


The Girl Who Kissed Saturn

by Puntrest



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: AU, Clexa, F/F, Minor Character Death, Sexual Content, secondary ships are Doctor Mechanic and Linctavia, some violence and gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-05-25 07:40:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 61,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6186244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puntrest/pseuds/Puntrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where a long lost space station originally located near the edge of the solar system floats back into Earth’s orbit after 97 years of total isolation. The Ark attempts to absorb this self-sustaining station, along with its invaluable resources and its strange people. The two societies quickly find themselves on the brink of war as both refuse to give up their political authority. On Clarke Griffin’s eighteenth birthday, she is released from juvenile lockup and is finally able to meet the descendants of the forgotten Trikru Research Outpost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Foreign Territory

Standing in the middle of the bedroom, Clarke Griffin surveyed her belongings. She hadn’t seen her room in over a year. It felt strange to be there, standing amongst the bright colors of childhood paintings tacked up on the walls, after having spent so much time in a dull prison cell. She walked over to her repurposed metal dresser where a small collection of personal items sat waiting for her in a line. She saw her father’s watch, still too a bit too big for her own wrist; she slipped it on anyway. There was a framed digital photo of her with her parents. They all looked so happy back then. So carefree, so unburdened. Next to the photo was a small porcelain figurine in the shape of a pig that had been brought into space by the Griffin family’s Earth ancestor. She loved the history of it, but the creepiness of those black eyes following you wherever you went was a little too unsettling.

Just as Clarke began to reach out and brush off the dust from her Exceptional Earth Skills award ribbon, the bedroom door slid open and in walked her mother. They’d been apart for a whole two minutes since Clarke had been released from lockup, but that was apparently too long for Abigail Griffin to handle.

“Everything is exactly the way you left it.” Abby said with a smile, as if not invading her daughter’s personal space and moving things around was a feat to be proud of.

Clarke wanted to scream. She wanted to pound her fists against the dresser, to yell as loud as she could, to let her mother know just how agonizing spending an entire year in lockup with unresolved grief had been. But she didn’t. Clarke had never been the type of person to reveal her own pain, and she wasn’t about to start now. Besides, today was about new beginnings, not the past.

Settling, Clarke nodded and said, “Thanks.”

Abby took a step forward and placed her hands on Clarke’s shoulders. She looked at her daughter with tears of joy building in her eyes. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you back home.”

“I’m happy to be back.” Clarke avoided the word ‘home’ on purpose. This place she’d grown up in, this bedroom where her father had taught her how to read and where her grandparents had given Clarke her first set of paintbrushes and where her mother had sung her to sleep after every childish nightmare, was no home to her. Not anymore. It was a tomb for a different life, for a different person.

Abby gave Clarke’s shoulders a comforting squeeze. “Happy birthday, Clarke.”

“Thanks.” Clarke shrugged out of her mother’s grip as casually as she could. She didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings, but the adjustment period between lockup and normal life had only just begun. After spending so many lonely nights wishing she had someone there to hold her or even just someone to confide in, and subsequently bottling up those feelings and shoving them down to the very depths of her consciousness, Clarke wasn’t ready for physical comfort just yet and she certainly wasn’t ready to talk through her feelings.

“Go.” Abby gestured to the open doorway, still smiling. “I know you must be eager to see your friends.”

With a simple nod in agreement and a forced smile, Clarke left the room.

\--

“Did you start a prison gang?” Raven asked before sharing a humorous grin with Finn.

Clarke sat across from the pair of best friends at the table, hardly paying any attention to them at all. Her interest was across the cafeteria, focused on a group of unfamiliar faces. They were all dressed in worn-out clothes, the kind of patched up fabric that had been passed down and recycled through the generations. Most of them had black tattoos on their faces and arms, a type of body modification the Arkers had only ever seen in old media from the Earth. The strangers were muscular too, far more so than the average Ark citizen was. They were captivating to watch, all huddled together at one table whispering words to each other.

“Hello?” Raven waved her hand in front of Clarke’s face. “Earth to Clarke?”

“If only.” Clarke muttered. Before either Raven or Finn could make a comment, a fourth seat at the table became occupied.

“Hey.” Wells greeted Clarke cautiously.

Clarke ignored Wells, instead turning her full attention to Raven and Finn. “So what’s up with the new people?”

Surprised, Finn asked, “They didn’t tell you about Trikru while you were in lockup?”

“They did.” Clarke clarified. “But only as a safety precaution. I meant, what are they like? What do we know about them?”

Raven glanced over her shoulder at the Trikru group across the cafeteria. Turning back, she leaned into her elbows on the table and lowered her voice. “Honestly, they’re incredible. There are about three hundred of them in total, which doesn’t sound like a lot to us, but the Trikru Research Outpost was only designed to sustain fifty people at max. They must have some serious technological advances going on over there to get their population up so high. And get this, their leader is _our_ age.” Raven’s face lit up. “And she’s smoking hot. We saw her when they first connected the bridge between their station and The Ark.”

Clarke was utterly fascinated, though no doubt everyone was. For nearly a century, the Arkers had believed that they were the last of humanity, and now they knew that lonely assumption to be untrue. Clarke had a million questions she wanted to ask, and it took some effort to only dish them out one at a time.

“So they have their own political system?” She asked.

Wells jumped in. “Yes and no. They’re not democratic like we are, so they don’t elect their leaders. I’m guessing it’s more of a monarchy system with the first born child of the previous leader being heir to the title. I mean, realistically, why else would they let someone so young be in charge of everything?”

“How do you know they didn’t elect their leader?” Clarke asked, still refusing to even so much as glance in Wells’s direction.

Growing almost bashful, Raven answered, “Your mom. She’s been keeping me updated on everything.”

Oblivious to Finn’s knowing smirk, Clarke asked Raven, “Since when are you friends with my mom?”

“Oh no.” Wells grumbled as something across the cafeteria caught his eye. The others quickly tried to follow his line of sight.

“Here we go again.” Finn sighed as a guard entered through the café doors. A tense silence fell upon the room as the rest of those dining noticed as well.

“Who is that? What’s going on?” Clarke asked in a whisper.

Raven leaned in even closer to whisper back, “You don’t remember Bellamy Blake?”

“ _That’s_ Bellamy Blake?” Clarke stared at the guard in awe. The last time she had seen Bellamy was years ago, when he was nothing but a lanky teenaged janitor who’d just been transferred to the night shift in Farm Station. The two hadn’t been friends, or even acquaintances, but she’d known _of_ him just as everyone on The Ark knew _of_ everyone else.

Raven nodded. “Yeah, and he’s not a real big fan of the Trikru people. The first day they were here, he got into a fistfight with one of them because they wouldn’t recognize his authority.”

Clarke watched Bellamy closely as he glared at the group of outsiders. Despite knowing nothing about these strangers, Clarke was overwhelmed with the desire to protect them from him.

She turned back to Raven and Finn, still ignoring Wells. “Does he even have any authority over them?”

“It’s complicated.” Finn replied. “Their Commander lady and The Council have been stuck in negotiations for the whole week that they’ve been here.”

Raven added, “I’m surprised Abby didn’t tell you about all of this.”

Clarke, whose real interest was over in the developing Trikru/Bellamy tension, was too distracted to catch that Raven was on a first name basis with her mother. “What’s the hold up? Why all the negotiations?”

Again, Wells forced his way into the conversation. “It’s your classic case of both sides thinking that they are the one who should be in control. The Council was under the impression that Trikru agreeing to join The Ark meant that they would want to assimilate into our society, but Trikru never planned to surrender their political power to us. They want to operate independently from The Ark, sharing resources when necessary. They’re all for mingling socially, but whenever they come into Ark territory they refuse to abide by our laws and they ignore our guards. A lot of Arkers want to flat out ban them from coming into our stations at all. The thing is, we can’t afford to offend or upset their leader. Trikru doesn’t need us to survive, but eventually we’ll need them.”

Clarke mulled it over for a moment while she watched Bellamy saunter up to the Trikru table. “What happens if they decide they don’t want to follow our rules?”

Finn used his thumb to gesture across the café to where Bellamy had begun loudly telling the people from Trikru to leave. With a joking grin, Finn said, “World War Four: Space Edition. Sounds catchy, right?”

“That’s not funny.” Wells and Clarke answered in accidental unison.

Desperate for a distraction from everything that Wells reminded her of, Clarke jumped out of her seat and, ignoring the growing protests from her friends, marched across the cafeteria. Bellamy Blake was standing with one hand on his electric baton, ready to give out shock lashes at a moment’s notice. Opposite him stood a large tattooed man with his hands balled into fists.

“Go back to where you came from!” Bellamy ordered.

“Why don’t you make me.” The man suggested angrily.

Without giving her course of action much thought, Clarke stepped between the two men and pushed them apart. “Hey! Enough with the fighting.”

A hint of recognition crossed Bellamy’s face, but he was otherwise unfazed by Clarke’s interruption. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Yes, it does.” Clarke argued. She only had half the story, if that, but even Clarke knew that policing a group of people who had spent the past ninety-seven years floating through space with zero contact to the world they’d left behind was wrong. “We needs friends, not enemies. Or did you forget that we’re all that’s left of humanity in the entire universe? How are we supposed to learn from each other and grow as a species if you two go and start a war?”

A woman from the Trikru table stood and the man stepped back immediately, his fists releasing with ease. The woman looked directly at Clarke as she spoke. “What is your name?”

Growing uneasy under the attention, she answered, “Clarke.”

“Clarke, I am Anya.” The woman replied. Though her tone was on the amicable side, her demeanor was anything but friendly. “I believe the Commander would like to see you.”

\--

Clarke had managed to follow Anya and her group of fellow Trikru members all the way to the bridge before The Council tried to intervene. They were all there, Abby included, waiting for everyone to arrive. The group from Trikru passed through the bridge with little concern, but Clarke, Raven, Finn, and Wells remained behind to hear what the Councilmembers had to say.

“Clarke…” Abby’s expression was filled with too many mixed emotions to read. “What are you doing? You’ve only been out of lockup for forty minutes and already you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in this?”

Raven sidestepped closer to Abby as she said, “Hey, if anyone can talk some sense into these people, it’s Clarke.”

“I agree.” Wells added unexpectedly. Clarke knew he was only trying to get back on her good side, but it was going to take a lot more than a brief show of support for her to ever view him with half as much respect as she used to.

With his arms folded across his chest, Chancellor Jaha looked from his son Wells, to Clarke. “Perhaps it’s time we approached this situation from a new angle.”

Councilmembers Marcus Kane and Diana Sydney were baffled.

Kane stepped forward. “Chancellor, we cannot send an unarmed citizen into foreign territory, especially one who has only just regained her rights.”

“I agree.” Diana did not bother to hide her disgust. “Clarke cannot negotiate on behalf of The Ark.”

Clarke shook her head. Even a year away from all of these people and their petty power struggles still wasn’t long enough. “I’m not going to negotiate anything. I’m going to talk to them. To learn about them. It doesn’t hurt anyone to sit down and have a conversation.”

Clarke could tell from the looks on their faces that not a single member of The Council had even considered befriending the Trikru people before making a finalized agreement on supplies and political boundaries. It sickened her that not one of them seemed to genuinely care about these strangers even half as much as they cared about their resources.

Turning her to her mother, Clarke said, “I’ll be back later.”

“Clarke…” Abby reached out her hand but let it fall. She knew better than any of them that Clarke’s stubbornness was not an easy thing to challenge. “Stay safe.”

\--

Alone at last, Clarke walked down a long rectangular room decked from floor to ceiling with plant life. The agricultural setup was incredible. Miniature potted trees scraped against the ceiling, the walls were lined with containers full of exotic ripening fruit, and leafy vines covered every inch of space that wasn’t being used as either a walkway or a space for tools. Clarke’s boots crunched against the fallen leaves and soil that littered the walkways. The air was thick and humid, like walking through a hot shower.

The door at the end of the rectangular room slid open with a long, grinding whine. A girl walked in, accompanied by two guards who remained near the doorway as she advanced. If the protection hadn’t given her away, then the Commander’s striking beauty would have. Her clothes, though aesthetically similar to her people’s, were clearly custom made. She was small in frame, and certainly small compared to her bodyguards, but her true strength was evident in the way she walked; powerful and confident. As the Commander finally reached her destination, Clarke noticed the way the color of her eyes matched the deep greens of plants around them.

“Clarke.” The Commander greeted with neither smile nor handshake. Instead, she tucked her arms behind her back and stood with her back uncomfortably straight.

“Commander.” Clarke tried to match her lack of emotion.

She sent a cautious glance over her shoulder at the guards across the room. Quietly, she offered, “My name is Lexa.”

“Lexa.” Clarke repeated with a nod, understanding that the use of her name was probably best kept between them.

“Anya told me about the incident in your dining hall.” Lexa’s voice returned to a normal volume. “Thank you for deescalating the situation.”

Clarke brushed it off. “It was the right thing to do.”

Lexa observed Clarke’s every movement, but whether she did this with interest or with worry was hard for Clarke to guess.

“Your people mistrust us.” Her head tilted to the side ever so slightly. “Yet you do not share their wariness. Why?”

Clarke drew in a deep breath, deciding that it would be best to just get the truth all out in the open right from the start. “I’ve spent the last year of my life imprisoned. I wasn’t even released until today.”

“Imprisoned?” The surprise was clear in her tone. “For what crime?”

“Treason.” Clarke began to worry that airing her dirty laundry at the start of the conversation might not have been the best plan after all. “I broke the law, for the good of my people, but my leaders didn’t see it that way.”

Understanding dawned on Lexa. “You mistrust your own leaders.”

“Well…not all of them.” Clarke tried to backpedal the best that she could. “And I wouldn’t say that I don’t trust them, exactly. I just don’t agree with them on most things.”

“I see why Anya brought you to me.” Lexa admitted. Her hand reached out and gently caressed the leaves of a vine that was dangling from a piece of metal framework. “Ever since the bridge was secured, your people have sent only the most loyal to speak of negotiations and compromises. Your perspective on this matter is of much greater value to me. Tell me, Clarke, what do your people want most from us?”

“Your resources.” Clarke answered truthfully.

“And what lengths would they go to obtain our resources?” Lexa’s eyes never left Clarke as she waited for an answer.

 “I don’t know.” Clarke lied. Finn had been right to say that The Council would go to war if they had to. They had been searching for ways to extend The Ark’s numbered days since the very first Unity Day, and out of the deep space had come this shining beacon of hope for all Arkers. There was no doubt in Clarke’s mind that The Council would stop at nothing to take everything Trikru had to offer.

But she couldn’t tell Lexa the truth. The people of The Ark would surely die without Trikru’s help.

Lexa walked over to the end of the room with Clarke trailing close behind. She pried a few vines away from the circular window and peered out at the view.

“My people have not known hunger since the dark days. They sleep peacefully, no longer afraid that their last breath will be drawn alone in the night. For generations, we have lived with the hope that we would one day see the world of green and blue that our ancestors spoke of.” Lexa moved more of the vines so that Clarke could have a proper view beside her. “Returning to Earth has always been the priority for us. In the beginning, they had hope that it was our own communications which had failed, but as the years went on, they accepted that some degree of devastation must have occurred. A nuclear war was certainly one of the more popular theories…but a part of me always hoped it wouldn’t be true.” A softness touched her features, and suddenly Clarke found herself having trouble looking away. “I once had a dream that I was on Earth running through a field of flowers with people who shared my lineage. My Earth ancestor left behind two brothers when she joined the Trikru Research Outpost. Both brothers had children. My ancestor was able to speak to them before communications went dark. None of them would likely be alive now, but I always hoped that I’d be able to meet their descendants when we finally reached Earth.” She cleared her throat and the softness fled her. “Your leaders say the Earth is uninhabitable.”

Finally able to pry her eyes away from Lexa, Clarke looked out at the blue planet below. “It probably is. The radiation levels are still high compared to what they were before the fallout. It’ll probably be another generation or two before it's safe for anyone to go down there.”

“You’re sure there are no survivors?” Lexa asked. “No one living safely beneath the surface?”

Clarke chose her words carefully. “If anyone’s alive down there, they’ve never tried to contact us. If there are survivors, we don’t know about them. I’m sorry.”

Lexa gave her a peculiar look. “Why are you apologizing?”

Clarke shrugged. “I can tell how much Earth meant to you.”

Lexa lowered the vines and stepped away from the window. “Are there others like you on The Ark?”

“Like me?” Clarke questioned, following Lexa’s lead as they strolled between the rows of plant life.

“Yes.” Lexa tucked her arms behind her back as she walked. “You view Trikru as people who live in a space station, not as a space station that happens to have people. Are there more like you?”

“Of course.” Clarke assured her. “The Council has to think objectively, but they _do_ care about your people. Their job is to ensure the safety and continued existence of humanity, and that has to include everyone from Trikru.”

Lexa glanced through the vines at the guards near the door, ensuring that they would not overhear her words. “Your leaders want me to relinquish all power and to have my people recognize The Council as our official leadership.”

Clarke watched her carefully. “But you don’t trust them.”

“Should I?” Lexa challenged.

Clarke felt the weight of humanity resting on her shoulders. She was torn. Logically, the right thing to do would be to advise Lexa to join The Ark and surrender her power. They would be able to split the resources fairly, to learn from each other, to grow as one people. But that was a perfect world, and they did not live in a perfect world. If Trikru agreed to follow The Ark’s laws, and the people continued to clash, there would be nothing to stop The Council from arresting every last Trikru person they felt like floating.

“No.” Clarke’s blunt answer surprised them both. “I mean, not yet. Let me talk to them. Let me see what they have planned. Any deal that gets made has to be a fair one. If I can help it, I won’t let you walk into a trap.”

“Would you really betray your own people to ensure the safety of mine?” Lexa asked, more than a little suspicious.

Clarke took a moment to think before saying, “I don’t think that we should be divided. I think _our people_ have to work together if we have any chance of getting humanity back to the ground. I’m not working for one side or the other, I’m here for all of us.”

Lexa sent yet another cautious glance to the guards. “Is it foolish of me to trust you?”

Clarke looked at the plethora of green around them, at the weaponless guards near the door, and finally at the girl who dreamed of running through a field of flowers on the ground. “That depends. If things don’t work out, do you have room on this side of the bridge for one more?”

“You dislike your people enough to leave them?” Lexa was stumped. “What did they do to hurt you so badly?”

Clarke swallowed back the raw emotion that threatened to give away how conflicted she truly was. She didn’t hate The Ark, but everything about her friends and her mother and The Council forced her to come face to face with feelings that she’d worked so hard to repress. Trikru was a way out. A new start. A fresh beginning. A place where no one knew her story, and where no one knew her pain.

“They locked me up.” Clarke reminded her. “It’s hard to forgive a group of people who voted for you to spend the rest of your childhood in a cell.”

“The rest of your childhood?” Lexa asked.

“Um, yeah. Only juveniles are sent to lockup on The Ark. Adults get floated.”

“Floated?”

Clarke turned away from Lexa as she answered, “Floated means getting sent outside to die. Every crime on The Ark is a capital offense punishable by death. There isn’t enough room in lockup for anyone but the adolescents.”

“Your ways are strange, but not so unlike our own. Severe crimes are typically met with an eye for an eye punishment, which can include death, but most crimes are forgiven in exchange for additional labor. We have no prison or lockup on Trikru. If I’m being honest, the entire concept is hard to grasp. What good is there in locking up a child until they turn eighteen?”

Clarke made it clear with her tone that she didn’t agree with the answer she was giving. “It’s supposed to rehabilitate us. To give us time to reflect on the wrong that we’ve done, time to learn our lesson and agree that we’ll never do it again.”

Lexa stopped and stared at Clarke. “And will you commit treason again, or have you learned your lesson?”

“If the lesson was to ignore the greater good and blindly follow The Council, then no. I did not.”

“What did you do that they branded as treason?” Lexa wondered aloud.

Avoiding the issue, Clarke replied, “That’s a story for another day.”

A small sigh escaped her. “I’m not sure how many more days of negotiations your Council will allow.”

“What do you want?” Clarke began walking again. “What would be your ideal compromise?”

Lexa kept up with Clarke’s pace as they turned a corner and started down another row. “I want to feel confident that my people and the life we have built will remain safe. I believe it would work best if Trikru and The Ark remained independently operated. However, my people do not wish to follow your rules. They find them to be frivolous and, quite frankly, so do I. Your way of life is strict and harsh. Life on Trikru is much more relaxed. We work where we want, we contribute where we can, and we don’t enforce respect. My people will never recognize an authority figure who has not first earned their respect. Your people come from a military background, I know that. Rules are a way of life for you. But we are the descendants of loners who willingly traveled to the edge of the solar system for the sake of scientific discovery.” She paused to retrace her train of thought. “My ideal compromise would be that Ark law ends on the bridge where Trikru law begins. I cannot promise that my people will follow your laws, but it is their choice to cross the bridge and it is your consequences that they can face. The same applies to Arkers in Trikru territory. If a punishment is needed, I, as the Commander, will be the one to decide their fate.”

“I think that’s fair.” Actually, Clarke wholeheartedly agreed with Lexa’s plan. The problem would be to get everyone else to agree as well. “I’ll talk with The Council about it.”

“Your people have already turned down my proposition several times.” Lexa informed her.

“I can get them to change their minds.” Clarke promised.

“How?” She asked.

“I have connections.” Clarke answered. When she saw that Lexa expected more, she added, “My mother is one of the councilmembers, and the Chancellor’s son and I…well, we go way back. I have some influence with them.”

“Not enough influence to escape a charge of treason.” She pointed out.

Clarke replied, “Lucky for you, there’s no law against negotiating on behalf of a foreign space station.”

“Would you really want to live on Trikru if your people preferred that we destroy the bridge?” She asked.

“I might.” Clarke admitted. “You’re already the best company I’ve had in over a year.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of Lexa’s lips. The sight sent butterflies to Clarke’s stomach.

She lowered her voice and sent a glance to the door. “I’m a much better conversationalist when there aren’t guards watching my every move.”

“Are you suggesting we speak in private sometime?” It had been ages since Clarke had felt the thrilling rush of flirtation, but in the back of her mind she knew it would be best to stay reasonable. In all likelihood, things would not go smoothly between The Ark and Trikru, and forming an emotional attachment to anyone from Trikru, let alone their leader, would surely only cause more harm than good.

Lexa tilted her head to the side, amused but guarded. “And what would you have us speak of?”

Clarke wanted to flirt. She wanted push the boundaries, to test the waters, to see if Lexa was truly picking up what Clarke was putting down. But she couldn’t. Things were much too complicated as they were, and if Clarke went and did something impulsive and stupid, it would only make things harder for herself. She could find someone back on The Ark to soothe her libido. It didn’t have to be the beautiful, interesting, foreign girl who happened to be the clever political leader of an entire society that had spent the previous ninety-seven years floating through space with the sole romantic purpose of returning to their home planet to rejoin their fellow humans so they could skip through a field of flowers together. So, of course, it _had_ to be her. Clarke was fucked, and not in the way she wanted to be.

Lexa was utterly mesmerizing, from her calculated words to her aura of unattainability. The fact that she was clearly just as astounded by Clarke as Clarke was of her only made the attraction stronger. Not to mention those lips and those eyes and those long fingers that caressed the leaves of plants so softly that her hand seemed to move in a spiritual flow along each vine it passed. There was so much to learn about her, and Clarke wanted nothing more than to stay in the garden and listen to every last thing this girl had to say.

But her people were waiting. The longer that Clarke took, the less time she would have to make The Council understand Lexa’s point of view.

After much deliberation, Clarke finally had an answer for Lexa’s question. “You’ll just have to invite me over sometime and find out for yourself.”

The small smile returned to its place at the corner of her lips. “Perhaps there is hope for our people yet. If we can get along, the rest may try to as well.”

“Yeah.” Clarke was still unsure as to whether or not Lexa was on the same page as her, so she decided to play it cool. “We should definitely be friends, you know, for the sake of our people.”

“I agree.” She nodded, not giving up any further hints.

Feeling a little rusty at the flirting game, Clarke decided it was best to stop while she was ahead. “I better go talk things through with The Council.”

“Of course.” Lexa redirected their path so that they were headed for the exit. Abruptly, she stopped halfway. “Clarke, I want you to know, you are welcome at Trikru if you ever wish to return.”

“Oh, I’ll be back.” Clarke assured her.

“And happy birthday.” She added quickly, as if the words had been sitting on the tip of her tongue the entire time.

Clarke smiled, surprised that Lexa had even caught that Clarke’s release from lockup was directly related to it being her birthday, but even more so that Lexa had actually wanted to say something about it.

\--

“Absolutely not.” Abby said, literally putting her foot down. The loud thump of her boot hitting the floor filled the council chamber, demanding silence from those within. Abby looked around at their audience, at her fellow councilmembers, at the Chancellor himself, at Wells, at Raven and Finn who had managed to weasel their way into the Big Important Discussion. Finally, she looked to Clarke and to Clarke alone.

“It’s too dangerous for you to go back. We don’t know what these people are capable of. They could hold you hostage and demand that we hand over our supplies. They could kill you just to set some sort of example. Their technology is advanced, even more powerful than our own. Who’s to say that they won’t use it to hurt you? To hurt all of us? This Commander is refusing to give up her power for a reason. She’s hiding something on that station. She has something that she doesn’t want us to know about.”

Clarke scoffed. “You’re just spouting paranoid garbage! You don’t even know these people, but you’re oh so certain that they’re heartless murderers? Look around, the real murderers are in this room.”

The councilmembers shifted uneasily under Clarke’s furious gaze. Wells, Raven, and Finn stepped into the background, flattening themselves against the nearest wall to avoid and observe.

“Clarke.” Chancellor Jaha folded his hands together. “Abby is right. It’s too dangerous. Though we all came from the same planet, we are no longer the same people. We have to proceed with caution.”

Irritated, Clarke threw up her hands. “I am telling you, the Commander _wants_ to work with us. She’s not hiding some big bad weapon. She’s playing it safe, just like all of you are trying to do right now. She doesn’t trust you because you haven’t done anything to earn her trust yet.”

Councilwoman Diana Sydney, with her near constant look of disgust, asked, “And just how do you expect us to earn the Commander’s trust?”

“You could start by trusting me.” Clarke replied.

“You?” Marcus Kane laughed. “You want us to trust you, a girl who was charged with treason?”

Abby sidestepped so that she stood between Clarke and the other councilmembers. “Listen to me, Clarke. No unauthorized citizens are allowed to leave The Ark. This was a decision The Council made before the bridge had even been secured. For the safety of everyone, you cannot go back to that station without The Council’s permission. Do you understand?”

“No.” Clarke looked to her friends for backup. “You guys agree with me, right? This isn’t fair.”

Raven was the first of the three wallflowers to break their silence. “Uh, yeah. I’m with Clarke. I mean, how’re you supposed to build trust if you don’t even want to _try_ trusting them?”

Finn nodded. “Yeah, yeah. We should all be allowed into Trikru. If we looked around and saw how they live, I bet we’d see that they really aren’t so different from us.”

Jaha looked to his son. “What about you, Wells? What’re your thoughts?”

Nervously, Wells gestured to the others. “I agree. We can’t expect to receive something that we’re not willing to give.”

Diana chuckled to herself. “Can someone please explain to me why we are consulting teenagers on this?”

Kane turned to Jaha as he said, “The Council should meet privately to discuss this matter further.”

“Yes.” Jaha agreed. “Yes, Clarke and the Commander have given us much to discuss.”

In a last ditch effort, Clarke said, “There’s nothing wrong with them wanting to maintain their independence. If things were reversed and they were the bigger station, none of you would want to give up your place on The Council to follow their Commander. Don’t demonize them for doing exactly what you would do too. We can live together, side by side in harmony, but only if you choose that path. The Commander wants peace, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank you, Clarke.” Jaha gestured to the door. “You and the others may go now.”

\--

“You’re sure this will work?” Clarke asked a tense whisper.

Raven flashed her light into Clarke’s eyes, temporarily blinding her. “Would you relax and let me do my job?”

“Sorry, okay.” Rather than hover over Raven’s shoulder as she pried apart and rewired the bridge door’s security control panel, Clarke returned to her watchful post at the corner. She peeked around it, searching for any kind of trouble. Satisfied that the coast was still clear, Clarke shot a thumbs up back down the hall to Finn, who occupied the opposite corner. He replied with a thumbs up of his own.

Just as Raven finally secured the control panel back to its original position with a proud grin, the sound of rushing footsteps met their ears. Panicked, Clarke scrambled to help Raven pack up her tools. By the time Finn had reached the bridge as well, the approaching visitor was upon them. Raven turned her light on newcomer, revealing them to be a sweaty teen out of breath.

Raven clicked off her flashlight and attached it to her work belt before asking, “Are there any guards following you?”

“Yes.” The girl nodded, struggling to catch her breath. “Just one. His name is Bellamy Blake.”

The three friends shared uneasy glances amongst themselves. They didn’t have the time to stop and save anyone, especially a girl none of the three seemed to recognize, but it went against everything they believed in not to.

Caving, Clarke asked the unfamiliar girl, “Are you from The Ark or are you from Trikru?”

With some hesitation, she answered, “The Ark.”

“Did you break any laws? Is Bellamy coming to arrest you?” Clarke questioned. If she was going to put her neck on the line for this girl, she had to know what she was getting herself into.

“Yes, I broke the law. Please, you have to help me.” The girl begged. “I can’t let him find me.”

Immediately, the trio began to brainstorm.

“Well, we can’t hide her in any of our rooms.” Finn tossed out the obvious throwaway.

Without much confidence, Raven suggested, “I might could get her into the mechanics’ storage room, but the odds of someone finding her in the morning are pretty high.”

Clarke noticed the desperation in the girl’s eyes, and suddenly it became clear to her what she needed to do.

“No one on The Ark is going to help us.” Clarke pointed to the bridge. “But the people in Trikru will.”

“How can you be so sure that Trikru won’t just give her up?” Raven asked, rightfully skeptical. “If The Council finds out that we helped a criminal escape to foreign territory, they’ll float her _and_ us.”

“I’ll talk to the Commander and tell her to keep it quiet. She seems like a reasonable person. And with The Council, well, you said so yourself that no one will know that we tampered with the bridge’s security control panel, so why would they assume she even left The Ark? Besides, it’s not like they’ll send guards out looking for her over there anyway.” Clarke turned to the girl. “What’s your name?”

“Octavia.” She answered with a trembling voice.

Clarke offered the girl her hand as she asked, “What crime will they charge you with?”

“I don’t know.” She confessed while taking Clarke’s hand. “I just know that they’ll float me the moment I’m of age.”

The distant sound of approaching footsteps reached them. Quietly, Clarke said, “I’m going to be honest with you, Octavia…I don’t know what will happen on the other side of this bridge. All I know is that Trikru is our best shot at keeping you safe.”

“Let’s go.” Octavia’s hand shook as it held tight to Clarke’s.

Clarke pulled Octavia over to the bridge door’s control panel, where she entered the two-button clearance code that Raven had programmed into it. Glancing back as the bridge door opened, Clarke asked Raven, “Can you cover for me if my mom comes looking?”

“Don’t worry.” Raven tried to suppress a smirk. “I’ve got it covered. She’ll never even know you were gone.”

Curious but entirely too preoccupied, Clarke ignored the weird response from Raven and headed into the unknown.

\--

Clarke stood awkwardly in the center of the Commander’s Office, too adrenalized to sit down. She hadn’t been out of lockup for twelve hours yet, and already she’d broken enough laws to get herself floated a dozen times over. To distract herself, Clarke took in her surroundings. A formidable desk with a chair resembling a throne was placed in front of the large window, one with a view of the moon that was outstandingly beautiful. Metal shelves filled to the brim with actual real-life paper books ran along the walls, taking up every bit of space that wasn’t occupied with a television monitor. Each screen displayed various diagnostic reports or live security feeds from different sections and hallways of the station, and a small lone screen near the door appeared to work as a community corkboard that featured news from the people (pod ball had been rescheduled to Tuesday night; see Gustus for signup).

The door creaked open and in walked the Commander, still dressed in the clothes she’d worn to speak with Clarke in the garden. She gestured for Clarke to sit on the battered couch as she took her place behind the desk. As Clarke finally allowed herself to sit, she noticed the undeniably powerful aura that Lexa radiated from her seat in front of the window with the distant moon sitting at her shoulder.

“Your friend is resting safely in our medical bay.” Lexa promised, her tone professional. “She was dehydrated, and it’s possible she is suffering from a nervous breakdown. My medical consultants will watch over her and ensure that she recovers swiftly.”

“Thank you for helping us.” Clarke said, hoping that her sincerity showed. “I know this puts everything we’re working for at risk.”

“It certainly could complicate things.” Lexa agreed. “Your people, what will they do if Octavia is discovered to be missing?”

“I don’t know.” Clarke lied. She knew exactly what they would do. “But it probably won’t be good.”

Lexa deliberated the situation for a moment, giving Clarke time to further admire just how captivating the Commander looked in the soft lighting of her office. The appeal did not fall solely on her natural beauty, but in the strength of her posture and the unyielding authority in her voice. There was no denying this woman was a leader, someone great and worthy of her title.

Finally, Lexa said, “I must admit, the more I learn about your people, the less inclined I am to accept any of their offers. My advisers believe your laws to be unethical and cruel, and they say our people will never follow them. If both Trikru and The Ark are to remain independent, I’m afraid the bridge will need to be closed off from any and all social visits.”

Any and all social visits? Clarke wasn’t about to accept that one without a fight. “We can figure something out. There has to be a compromise that both sides can agree on.”

“Have your people given their verdict on our latest proposal?” Lexa questioned.

Clarke blew out a heavy sigh. “No, not yet. They’ve probably adjourned the council meeting for the night by now, but I’m sure they’ll go back to arguing first thing in the morning. But don’t worry, I’ll stay involved the whole way through. You can count on me to make sure that your concerns are heard.”

“I admire your perseverance, Clarke, but I can’t help but wonder why you are so dedicated.” She confessed.

“At the risk of sounding pretentious…” Clarke paused. “I see the union of our people as being the absolute key to bringing humanity back to the ground, and I believe I’m in a unique position to provide what both sides need most right now: a voice of reason that doesn’t feel blind allegiance to either side. I may have been born on The Ark, and I may have grown up there, and all of my friends and my mother may live there…but I’ve never in my life felt like The Ark was where I belonged. Just like you, I’ve dreamt of being on the ground. I don’t want to just give our future generations a chance to return to the ground, I want to guarantee that together our people _will_ bring humanity home.”

A small smile formed on Lexa’s lips, a feature which Clarke had a difficult time not staring at. She clasped her hands together on the desk and replied, “Your passion is admirable. I agree that reclaiming the Earth on behalf of our species should be the ultimate goal for all those involved. However, I also believe your leaders uphold a corrupt system that I cannot easily ignore. No deal your people offer is worth more than our independence, than our freedom to live as we always have. I hope The Council knows that we will not be intimidated by your weapons or your size. If they wish to share in our provisions and our equipment, they must understand that what we offer cannot be taken by force should they decide an alliance is no longer in their best interest. We will defend ourselves.”

“And you would have every right to defend yourself.” Clarke agreed. “But I know Trikru doesn’t want a war, and I know there are people in The Ark who don’t want one either. We can find a solution that will please both sides. It may take some time, and it may take a lot of debating, but we’ll get there. Trust me.”

“I do trust you.” Lexa’s voice was soft. “There’s just…something about you that makes it easy.”

Just as a flirtatious response flittered through Clarke’s mind, a screeching filled the room and drew their attention to the door. A woman with facial tattoos and bulky apparel entered.

“Heda, I bring you news of the one named Octavia.” The woman’s demeanor shifted as she realized Clarke was in the room. “Forgive me, I did not realize you had company.”

Lexa leaned back in her chair and waved the visitor forward. “Indra, please, give your news.”

Indra gave a dutiful nod and said, “She has confessed that she is a fugitive of The Ark, though she does not wish to disclose her crimes.”

“Yes, I am aware of this predicament.” Lexa replied.

“Heda!” Indra was appalled. “You knew this girl was fleeing prosecution, yet you allowed her into our care?”

“Yes.” Lexa answered simply. “We do not turn our back on those who seek our help.”

Indra did not try to hide her frustration in the least. “Now is not the time for old words from Earth ancestors. If The Ark discovers what you have done, they will not treat it lightly.”

“I fully understand the consequences of my actions. I do not need you to tell me of them.” Lexa’s tone was not to be questioned, making Clarke marvel at the respect she commanded.

Indra’s gaze fell to the floor. “Of course, Heda. Forgive me for speaking out of turn.”

The door opened once more, this time allowing for two more to enter the Commander’s Office. Clarke recognized the woman to be Anya, the one who had brought Clarke to the garden earlier in the day, and the man to be the one who had stood up to Bellamy Blake in the cafeteria.

“Anya. Lincoln.” Lexa greeted politely. Neither seemed as surprised as Indra to see Clarke sitting on the couch.

“Commander.” Anya gave a slight bow before continuing. “As you’ve requested, the bridge’s security has been reevaluated and a new code is being implemented as we speak.”

“Thank you.” Lexa looked from one Trikru member to the next. “Indra, your concern has been noted. You may return to the medical bay and continue keeping watch over our guest Octavia. Lincoln, I must ask that you accompany Indra and keep guard. You may leave your post when a proper replacement is approved. Anya…” Lexa glanced to where Clarke sat, silent and observant. “Have the new code we discussed sent to me when it is in full effect.”

Wordlessly, the three Trikru members gave respectful bows and exited the office.

Clarke waited until the door had slid shut before asking, “Heda?”

“Yes?” Lexa prompted, waiting expectantly for Clarke to continue.

Clarke laughed as she realized the miscommunication that had occurred. “No, I meant, why do they call you that?”

“Oh.” Lexa turned a tad bashful at the mix-up. “Heda is synonymous with commander.”

“Where does that term come from?” Clarke asked, curious.

“In the dark days, my people separated into two factions, with each believing that they were the rightful rulers of Trikru. As a way to keep their plans secretive, one faction developed a second language to communicate with. By the time the conflict ended, Trigedasleng had already spread to the others. For many decades Trigedasleng was our primary language, but the Commander before me decreed that a return to English was necessary if we desired to assimilate back into life on Earth. Despite this, some terms and phrases, as you’ve noticed, have become so ingrained in our way of life that they never reverted back to English.”

“You’ve mentioned the dark days before.” Clarke noted. “What is that?”

“A time of inaction.” She explained. “The dark days were the years between losing all communication and the decision to send Trikru back to Earth. This station was supplied with only enough fuel to travel to the edge of our solar system, a place that it was never meant to leave. Every drop of fuel that remained was used to set Trikru back in motion toward Earth. After that, we relied solely on the hope that no obstacle would derail us from our path. There were setbacks, of course, most notably navigating the asteroid belt with our thrusters and avoiding Saturn’s gravitational pull.”

“You saw Saturn?” Clarke asked in awe. “You floated right by it?”

Lexa smiled at Clarke’s reaction. “Yes. It was eight or so years ago, but I remember it well.”

With a smile of her own, Clarke said, “I bet it was beautiful.”

“It was.” Lexa concurred with a nod. Hesitantly, she added, “At the time, I was sad that our meeting with Saturn would be so brief. I loved looking out my bedroom window and seeing it out there, something bright and beautiful in a scene that was usually devoid of color. On our final day of visibility, I went to the window and I kissed Saturn goodbye. I think that was when I first learned what it meant to be heartbroken.”

“Wow.” Dumbfounded, Clarke struggled to find a coherent response. “Sounds like a great first kiss. Mine was with a girl from Farm Station. She kind of slobbered all over me. It wasn’t pretty.”

With a bittersweet smile, Lexa said, “My real first kiss was much different than my kiss with Saturn. Her name was Costia.”

“I don’t mean to pry…” Clarke knew she was wading into dangerous waters, but her curiosity was too great to ignore. “But what happened to her?”

Lexa avoided looking at Clarke as she replied, “She was murdered. As I said before, Trikru was split into factions during the dark days. The ones who created Trigedasleng referred to themselves as Grounders, as in the side most capable of returning to the ground, while the other faction named themselves Azgeda, after their leader’s homeland. The Grounders wanted to return to Earth, while Azgeda wanted to leave our solar system in search for a new planet to inhabit. Though the conflict ended with the Grounders winning, some of Azgeda’s beliefs are still present in their descendants to this very day. A particularly radical one wanted to overthrow me. She had Costia killed to break me, but the action obviously did not provide the results she had hoped for.”

“Oh my god.” Clarke gaped. Just when she thought Lexa was done surprising her, another curve ball came flying her way. “What happened to the person who wanted to overthrow you?”

“An eye for an eye.” Lexa answered quietly. “Or, as the Trikru Earth ancestors would put it, blood must have blood.”

Clarke nodded understandingly before asking, “So how does one become commander, exactly?”

“Traditionally, children who show the greatest potential are placed into a special group to be physically and mentally trained for leadership roles. When a commander dies, a conclave is held until the next commander is chosen through rigorous testing of the mind, body, and spirit.”

A loud beeping noise sounded from the monitor closest to Lexa’s desk, earning both of their attentions.

“What does the mean?” Clarke asked, searching the screen of rushing diagnostic reports for anything that stood out.

“It means I have received the new clearance code for the bridge’s control panel.” Lexa gave Clarke a sly look. “It needed to be upgraded so that no further breaches in our security can occur.”

Clarke smirked. “Yeah, you know, it really wasn’t all that hard to get into this place.”

Lexa’s expression became impossible to read. “This is a serious matter.”

“Oh.” Clarke’s smirk fell as embarrassment flooded her. “I’m sorry, I just—“

Lexa cut her off with a laugh. “It’s okay, Clarke. You’re not in any trouble.”

“So you didn’t mind my breaking and entering?” Clarke asked with a nervous laugh.

Growing coy, Lexa replied, “Not at all. And the next time that you want to cross the bridge unescorted, all you’ll need to do is use the clearance code. No breaking necessary.”

Clarke’s smirk returned in full force. “Are you suggesting that I should visit you late at night again sometime?”

“Perhaps I am.” She said with an alluring tone that sparked more than just a slight arousal in Clarke.

“Then perhaps I’ll take you up on that.” Clarke replied with a grin. “Late at night is probably the only time I’ll be able to sneak off The Ark anyway. There’s kind of a ‘no unauthorized citizens may cross the bridge into Trikru territory’ rule in effect right now.”

Lexa shook her head, clearly charmed by Clarke’s rebelliousness and nerve. “I think you’ve broken enough of your people’s laws for one night. We should get you back across the bridge before your absence is noticed.”

“It is getting pretty late.” Clarke accepted. “I guess I should go.”

“Come, I’ll show you the way.” Lexa offered as she stood from her desk.

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” Clarke quickly stood up as well. “I’d probably spend hours wandering around this place lost if I was on my own.”

Clarke followed Lexa’s lead out of the Commander’s Office and down a long hallway.

“What will happen to Octavia after she’s cleared to leave your medical bay?” Clarke asked as they turned down a new hallway. It was remarkable just how similar the Trikru station was to The Ark, from the color scheme, to the use of materials, to even the shape of their doors and windows.

“We will find space for Octavia, should she wish to remain with us.” Lexa promised.

“Thank you again for helping.” Clarke said earnestly, turning down another hallway. “You didn’t have to, but you did, and that means a lot.”

“I’m happy to help.” Lexa replied as they reached their destination. She reached out and began typing into the security control panel, her lithe fingers gliding over its screen with a practiced swiftness. As the bridge doors began to open, she turned to Clarke and said, “The new clearance code is three, twelve, one, eighteen, eleven, five.”

“Okay…” Clarke hesitated. “Honestly, I’m probably not going to remember that.”

Lexa glanced around to ensure they were alone and lowered her voice. “It’s a simple substitution cipher. Each number corresponds with the position of a letter in the alphabet. The number one, for example, would stand for the letter A. The new clearance code is three, twelve, one, eighteen, eleven, five. Or, if it’s translated into letters, the word Clarke.”

“My name.” Clarke said dumbly. “It spells my name? Why is my name the code?”

She smiled at Clarke’s innocent confusion. “You’re the reason we had to change the original code prematurely. It’s easier for us to remember the new one this way.”

“Oh, well, that makes sense.” Clarke was a little embarrassed that all of Trikru would know her as the girl who broke into their station, but she couldn’t blame them; it _was_ an easy code to remember.

Tucking her arms behind her back, Lexa said, “Farewell, Clarke, until we meet again.”

“Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.” Clarke replied. “Goodnight, Lexa.”

The tiny pleased smile that Clarke received from Lexa in response to using her name rather than her title said more to Clarke than words ever could.


	2. The Masquerade

 

Lying on her back, Clarke stared up at the ceiling from her bed. She’d hardly slept at all, and now that the morning hours were upon her, she likely wouldn’t be getting any further rest either. Her mind was running wild with thoughts of Trikru and their Commander. No one had ever captivated Clarke quite in the same way as Lexa had. How someone could be so easy to talk to, so endlessly interesting, but look so unapproachably intimidating, was beyond fascinating to Clarke.

The sound of hushed voices seeped into the room from under the door, and suddenly Clarke was up on her feet. It wasn’t unusual for Abby to be woken by an associate if there was a medical emergency, but with the Trikru tensions rising, Clarke thought it best to go ahead and check on the disturbance. She quickly slipped on a jacket and her boots before exiting the bedroom. What she found in the living area was anything but what she had expected to find there.

“ _Raven_?” Clarke had to rub her eyes to ensure that her tired mind wasn’t playing tricks on her.

Caught off guard with a mouthful of synthetic oatmeal, Raven slowly lowered her spoon and said, “Hey, Clarke.”

“What are you doing here?” Clarke took a step forward. “In my living quarters...” She crossed her arms. “Eating my breakfast...” She narrowed her gaze suspiciously as she recognized the shirt Raven had thrown on. “Wearing my mother’s clothes…” The figurative light bulb went off just as the door to Abby’s room slid open and revealed the woman herself.

“Clarke!” Abby jumped, not having expected to see her daughter up so early. “What’s going on? Are you okay?” With horrible acting skills, she glanced to the mechanic in the kitchen and added, “Oh. Raven. I didn’t know you were here. Is there something you need?”

Clarke didn’t know what shocked her more, the fact that Raven was banging her mother or the atrocious train wreck of a cover-up that was unfolding before her eyes.

“Please, stop.” Clarke begged. She cringed as the unsolicited mental image of Raven in Abby’s bed consumed her mind. “You’re just making it worse.”

Setting down her bowl of oatmeal, Raven cautiously walked toward the Griffin girls. “Okay, Clarke, listen, before you say anything else, hear us out.” She kept a safe distance away, just in case. “This isn’t how we wanted to tell you.”

Looking anywhere but at her mother, Clarke asked, “How long?”

Raven hesitated. “Which part?”

Clarke was trying very, _very_ hard to keep her cool. “How long has _this_ been going on?”

With great difficultly, Abby swallowed back her pride and summoned her Professional Doctor Tone. “Are you asking how long Raven and I have been intimate?” 

Clarke felt sick with embarrassment. “You know what, don’t answer that. I don’t need to know. In fact, I don’t want to know any details at all. Let’s just…not talk about this anymore.”

A hopeful smile touched Raven’s lips. “So, you’re like, cool with us?”

“I don’t know.” Clarke answered honestly, risking a glance to her mother. She was at least glad to see that Abby looked as equally as uncomfortable with their current dilemma as Clarke felt. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Abby’s professional façade began to crack, with nothing but worry seeping through the edges. “Though Raven is nineteen and consenting, this relationship needs to remain a secret. There are some who could view our age gap as being irresponsible. If word were to get out, I could lose my place on The Council with the upcoming reelections.”

Clarke had to resist the urge to smirk as the silver lining finally showed itself. She looked between the two women, one a friend who would risk her own life to help save an innocent girl in trouble and the other a mother who would preach the value of the law until her dying breath. They were an odd couple, one divided on so many issues, and yet somehow they managed to look beyond their obstacles and their differences to find happiness together. It was then that Clarke knew without a doubt that she could spin this quandary to her favor.

“Tonight, I’m going across the bridge.” The confidence in Clarke’s tone was unmistakable.

Abby let out a sharp sigh. “Clarke…you can’t blackmail me into letting you break the law, and you cannot go into foreign territory on your own like that.”

“I’m not asking for your permission.” Clarke said simply. “I’m telling you what’s going to happen.”

“Are you trying to punish me?” Abby asked, growing visibly upset. “If you don’t want me and Raven to see each other, you need to say something. Acting out is only going to cause problems.”

Clarke found it difficult to keep her anger subdued. “Mom, I don’t care who you sleep with. I’m not going to Trikru because of you, I’m doing it for me. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can do something that matters. I feel like I have a purpose. If we want humanity back on the ground, Trikru has to work with us. Lexa—“ Clarke faltered, not having meant to disclose how friendly she already was with Trikru’s leader. “I mean, the Commander…is a reasonable person. She doesn’t want to hurt me. She doesn’t want to hurt any of us. I can talk to her. I can make this deal happen. Trikru and The Ark _can_ coexist in peace, and I’m going to be the one who makes it happen.”

Abby gave a sad smile. “You can be so much like your father sometimes.”

Taken aback by on onslaught of mixed emotions, Clarke tried to swallow them down as best she could. “Then you know there’s nothing that can stop me from doing this.”

“I know.” Abby nodded, looking as if she might be holding back tears. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”

\--

Clarke had already finished her dinner by the time a group of Trikru members filtered into the cafeteria. The ones named Anya and Lincoln were once again among those brave enough to venture over the bridge. Clarke had learned from her friends that the same group always arrived once a day at dinnertime to sit by themselves. What these strangers hoped to accomplish through this, none of them could say for sure.

“Check it out.” Finn was the first to verbally acknowledge their presence.

Raven leaned in and lowered her voice. “Do you think they’ll tell us about Octavia if we ask?”

Confused, Wells leaned in as well. “Who is Octavia?”

Clarke ignored Wells’s question and answered Raven with, “There’s only one way to find out.”

Getting up from the table, Clarke proceeded to cross the cafeteria and stand before the group of Trikru citizens. Each of them stared up at her with open curiosity, surely knowing her as the girl who’d broken into their station to have a private conversation with their Commander in the night—the girl whose name was now their new security clearance code.

“Clarke.” Anya greeted with neither smile nor frown. The man named Lincoln, on the other hand, did not bother to hide his skeptical glare.

“Can we talk?” Clarke asked her quietly. “Preferably somewhere that isn’t here.”

In unison, Anya and Lincoln stood. They waited expectantly for her to lead them.

“Oh.” It took Clarke a moment to catch up. She had only meant to speak with Anya, but of course Trikru would feel uneasy about sending any of their people off alone with an Arker. “Okay. Follow me.”

Clarke led the way out of the cafeteria, under the watchful gaze of all those present, and to the one place where she knew they wouldn’t be interrupted.

Upon stopping, Anya and Lincoln tentatively observed the new section of The Ark like scientists exploring a dangerous cave. Anya’s gaze fell to the Chinese characters on the wall, then to the airlock doors beside the words.

“Where are we?” Anya asked, sounding as if she already knew the answer would be unfavorable. “What is this place?”

“The Ark’s expulsion doors.” Clarke dreaded every second that she had to stand there and stare through the glass of those airlock doors. “This is where adult criminals are expelled from The Ark as punishment for their crimes.”

Anya and Lincoln exchanged a look that Clarke couldn’t quite define.

After a few moments, Anya asked, “You said that you wanted to speak with us. Why do it here?”

“My people avoid this section of The Ark.” Clarke explained. “What we say here won’t be overheard.”

Anya ran her hand along the Chinese markings. “Can you read what this says?”

“No. This part of The Ark originally belonged to a station called _Shenzhen_. Very few of us still know their language.” Clarke was sure that no one would happen to come across them here, but she lowered her voice just to be safe. “I wanted to ask you about Octavia. How is she doing?”

Much to Clarke’s surprise, it was Lincoln who answered.

“She’s healthy.” He scowled before adding, “And safe from your people.”

Anya glanced to the doors, to the scratch marks on the walls left by heartbroken lovers, to the scuff marks on the floor from children’s shoes as they were dragged away from the last place they’d ever see their loved ones alive again.

“Is this where your leaders would have Octavia killed?” Anya asked, monotone and unreadable.

Clarke had to physically turn herself away from the doors to keep from reliving the nightmare of watching the very life be sucked from her father’s body as it was projected out into space to float aimlessly for all eternity.

“Yes.” Clarke answered. “This is where everyone gets floated.”

Lincoln looked especially menacing with his brows furrowed so closely together. “You would expel her into space for the crime of _being born_ , and yet your guards call us the savages?”

“Wait, what?” Clarke felt she must’ve missed a vital piece of information. “Octavia never told me why the guards wanted to arrest her.”

Anya explained, “She told us she was born as a second child, and that her mother broke the law by having her and again by raising her in secret.”

“She was forced to live beneath the floor.” Lincoln added.

“I didn’t know that.” Clarke replied. “Did she say who her family is?”

“No.” Lincoln answered, still heated. “She is afraid.”

Clarke found Lincoln’s emotional reaction to be interesting, but she didn’t feel that it was her place to ask why he’d become so protective of a girl none of them even knew.

“Is she feeling better?” Clarke asked them both.

“Yes.” Anya said. “She has been discharged from the medical bay. Lincoln has graciously offered his room to her while we search for a more suitable living arrangement.”

She was grateful. “Thank you for taking care of her. I won’t be able to cross the bridge until tonight when everyone’s gone to bed, but when I do, how can I find her? I’ll need to speak with her.”

Anya raised a brow. “Your people do not know that you come to Trikru?”

“No.” Clarke fidgeted nervously with her hands. “And if they find out I’ve been crossing the bridge without The Council’s permission, they’ll bring me here.”

Anya and Lincoln sent a wary glance to the airlock doors.

Clarke quickly added, “This situation we’re in is only temporary. Together, we can make things work. The Council has been meeting with advisers from all over The Ark all day long to try and find a solution that will work best for everyone.”

“Heda already gave her solution.” Lincoln reminded her. “Your leaders search for a deal that benefits them, not a deal that benefits all.”

He had a point, but Clarke knew that she couldn’t outwardly agree. “The Commander’s views have been made clear to The Council. I made sure of at least that much.”

“Who are you to your people?” Anya asked, her tone shifting. “Why does Heda demand that your meetings be kept private?”

“I’m a wild card.” Clarke hesitated before adding, “And if you wish to know the Commander’s intentions, then I am not the one you should be asking.”

Anya seemed impressed with Clarke’s answer. Amused, she asked, “A wild card?”

“My leaders know that I can’t be controlled.” Clarke gave a weak shrug. “I’m at outlier to them, an unknown factor. They can’t predict what I’ll do because I’m my own person rather than a servant to their ideals. You can trust me to do what’s right for everyone.”

Anya gave Lincoln a pointed look before saying to Clarke, “Heda is looking forward to your next visit. She has not said as much in words, but I know it to be true. That is why I have to ask…what are your intentions with her?”

Feeling as though she’d been thrust into the spotlight, Clarke struggled to quickly find an appropriate response. “Well, I guess I just want us to be friends. I think there’s a great deal that we can learn from each other. And I think a friendship could benefit both sides.”

Satisfied, Anya gave a nod and said, “We will inform Octavia that you wish to call upon her in the late hours, and I will personally relay our conversation to Heda.”

Without another word or even a goodbye, the two Trikru members turned and left Clarke standing alone by the airlock doors.

\--

Much to Clarke’s displeasure, Raven and Finn had decided to throw an official ‘Welcome Home’ party for Clarke in honor of her release from lockup. The location they picked was far off the grid of any guard’s patrol, but not without risk.

“Wow.” Clarke muttered upon entering the off-limits _Mir-3_ mechanical storage chamber. The walls were covered with decades of crude graffiti, and garbage had been collected into piles beneath every surface and around each unidentifiable stack of broken parts. It was clearly a hot spot for debaucherous activity, though why the older generations collectively ignored it was a mystery.

Finn clapped his hands together. “This place has seen better days, but it’s the best we’ve got.”

Finn provided the music, while Raven and Wells—who Clarke fervently avoided speaking with—cleared some space for dancing. The room wasn’t large, with most of the space being taken up by an old damaged Russian escape pod, but it would work find for one evening of partying. The rest of the guests arrived within minutes, though their quick turn out was not in the least bit surprising. The Ark could be an exceptionally dull place for a young adult, and partying was one of the few ways that they could rebel against their authority figures without getting floated for it.

“Congrats on finally getting out!” Jasper Jordan shouted as he and Monty Green arrived on the scene. The pair were just two of the many teens that Clarke had befriended whilst in lockup. Losing them once they’d aged out had been tough on her morale.

“Yeah.” The apathetic drone of John Murphy’s voice graced their ears, causing Clarke, Jasper, and Monty to turn and discover the source standing behind them. Murphy smirked at the trio. “Congrats on getting out.”

Unwilling to let Murphy put a downer on their good time, Jasper and Monty fled the conversation in search for the hooch and herbs that they knew would be hiding somewhere in the room.

“Sorry to scare off your fun.” Murphy muttered, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

“You did me a favor.” Clarke’s reply amused him. Murphy was a renowned cynic, but more than that he was the sole reason Clarke had managed to maintain her sanity during the final months of her incarceration up until his own release date. He was reliably honest, even when the truth would only cause harm, and that was a rare trait to come across.

Murphy stepped off to the side, further secluding their conversation from the rest of the gathering. “I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

“Only one what?” Clarke questioned, glancing over her shoulder at the others.

“Who can’t fit back in like nothing ever happened.” He answered. “There’s word going around that you’ve been in Trikru.”

“I met with their leader.” Clarke confirmed.

In a hushed voice, he asked, “Are they accepting new residents? Transfers? Immigrants? Whatever you want to call it, I just want out of this godforsaken tin can. I’m tired of these people. I want new ones.”

“I can ask.” It was the most Clarke could offer.

“Thanks. I would really appreciate that.” There was a touch of sincerity in his tone that Clarke had never heard before.

Stepping around her, Murphy left to join the rest of the party. Clarke had only a moment to herself before Raven appeared and grabbed her by the wrist. Without giving Clarke time to question what was going on, Raven pulled her out of the party and into the hallway.

“Raven…” Clarke pulled her hand away from the mechanic and forced her to stop. “What are you doing?”

Looking uncharacteristically nervous, Raven said, “We have to talk. I know this morning you said that you didn’t care who Abby sleeps with, but I just wanted to make sure that you and I are still cool.”

“Yeah, we’re cool.” Clarke dismissed the notion with ease. “It’s a weird situation, and I’m not entirely thrilled about it…but it’s fine. You can’t help who you love and I get that.”

A smile lit up Raven’s face. “Thank you. It means a lot to finally have your approval. I’ve been feeling kind of guilty about it ever since it started.”

Clarke couldn’t resist her own curiosity. “And when was that?”

“About three months ago.” Raven confessed. “She called for a mechanic to fix the telecom in your living quarters. We started talking about how much we missed you, how we hoped you were doing okay in lockup, then we started talking about life and, you know, one thing just sort of led to another.”

“Does Finn know?” Clarke asked.

“Yes, but not because I told him.” Raven replied hurriedly. “He figured it out on his own. It wasn’t my fault.”

“What about Wells?”

“No. No one else knows. Just you and Finn.”

“Let’s keep it that way.” Clarke sneered. “Wells isn’t exactly the best at keeping secrets.”

Raven had trouble meeting Clarke’s eyes as she asked, “Are you ever going to forgive him?”

“No.” Clarke had no problem admitting that. “I will never forgive him for getting my father floated.”

“Isn’t that a little harsh?” She asked. “It’s not like he wanted your dad to get floated, he was just doing what he thought was right.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Clarke made sure with her tone that the topic would end there.

“Yeah.” Raven nodded understandingly. “We should get back to the party.”

“Wait.” Clarke grabbed Raven by the shoulder and held her in place as a group of teens rounded the corner. Each of the newcomers wore a mask over their eyes, properly obscuring their identities. “What is that?”

Raven chuckled at Clarke’s confusion. “Back on Unity Day they put on a masquerade dance for everyone under eighteen. I guess they just wanted an excuse to wear theirs again.”

She smiled as an idea popped into her head. “Do you think you could get me one of those masks?”

\--

Three. Twelve. One. Eighteen. Eleven. Five. Clarke shook her head as the control panel accepted the clearance code. Typing her own name, even in a numerical format, into a high-tech security system and having it actually work, felt just as ridiculous as it sounded.

She crossed the bridge quickly, not wanting any stray Arker or guard to catch her illegally entering Trikru territory. It was still a few hours early compared to when she originally planned on making her trip, but it was late enough that most people were already back in their own living quarters for the night. Or at least, they were on The Ark. Trikru, on the other hand, was still a bustling beehive of activity. Each hallway Clarke ventured down had open doors with people moving in and out of rooms with a rhythm all their own. People laughed and shouted their conversations over the heads of others. They played games and roared with victory or loss, either way enjoying themselves and their company. It was loud and it was fun; it was like nothing Clarke had ever seen before.

After a few wrong turns, Clarke finally found the Commander’s Office. She knocked on the door and waited. It slid open with its usual grinding creak, followed by Lexa saying, “You may enter.”

Even just hearing Lexa’s voice made her melt, and it was then that Clarke knew she was utterly and completely screwed.

“Clarke.” Other than showing mild surprise, Lexa kept her expression vague.

“Hey.” Clarke greeted over the sound of the door sliding shut behind her. She walked straight to the couch and took a seat on it, trying hard to not to overly stare at Lexa. The Commander looked especially beautiful with her hair pulled over one shoulder and a hint of traditional makeup on her face. Cosmetics were still prevalent on The Ark, though their use was typically reserved for special occasions since their production was so limited. In a moment of hopeful weakness, Clarke wondered if perhaps Lexa thought that their planned late night meeting _was_ a special occasion.

Acknowledging the time, Lexa said, “You’re earlier than I thought you’d be.”

“Yeah, well, you know…” Clarke decided to push her luck. “I was excited to see you again.”

Lexa remained unreadable. “I spoke with Anya. She had much to say about you.”

“All good, I hope.” The severity of which Clarke actually did hope that Anya had spoken well of her was more than a bit alarming to her.

“For the most part, yes.” Lexa revealed. “I can summon for Octavia whenever you like.”

“Oh, you don’t have to drag her here, I can go to wherever she is.” Clarke replied.

“Then let us walk.” Lexa announced as she stood from her chair.

Navigating the crowded halls on her own was one thing, but walking them with Lexa was an entirely different experience. When the average Trikru citizen recognized that their Commander was near, the fun and games ceased to exist. They stood silent and at attention until she passed, and only resumed their raucous fun once Lexa was out of sight. Though it was an impressive show of respect and power, it was also a rather sad thing to witness. Clarke was left wondering if Lexa’s entire political career had been this way, and if that was true, when did she ever get to join the common people and have a little fun of her own? Who even were her friends? The only people Clarke had seen interact with Lexa were Anya, Lincoln, and Indra, but those three were clearly subordinate followers and not necessarily the kind of friend one would invite out to a party. Mostly, Clarke wondered if Lexa felt anywhere near as lonely as her life appeared to be from the outside looking in.

Lexa abruptly stopped outside of a room and knocked on the door. It opened almost immediately to reveal Lincoln on the other side.

“Lincoln.” Lexa greeted before looking past him to where Octavia sat cross-legged on the bed. “Octavia.”

“Heda.” He gave a slight bow and stepped aside to allow them entrance.

Clarke hastily followed Lexa through the doorway, almost fearful that Lincoln would try to shut the door before she could get in. Though his anger at those who would prosecute Octavia was not outrageous, it was certainly misplaced; Clarke felt the full weight of his glare as she stood within his humble abode.

The first thing Clarke noticed was how the room smelled strongly of leather and citrus. She also noted how the entire space was oddly warmer than the hallway outside had been. Other than the bed tucked into the corner and a single bookshelf filled with the handmade knickknacks, there was a shiny silver toilet attached to the wall beside a sink. A showerhead was in the corner near the open bathroom setup, with a thin plastic curtain strung up to contain excess water and channel it toward the single drain in the floor.

Clarke was thrown off by the lack of privacy at first, but the more she thought about it, the less strange it seemed. According to Raven, the Trikru Research Outpost had been designed for fifty people at maximum capacity—fifty people who were never meant to reproduce and increase the population. It made sense that they would have no need for communal bathrooms or showers, especially on a family level. She did, however, make a note to ask if all rooms looked like Lincoln’s, and if so how families managed to live in a space designed for the comfort of a single person.

Doing her best to ignore Lincoln’s glare, Clarke turned to Octavia.

“Hi.” She greeted softly. Octavia looked so small and vulnerable as she hugged her knees close to her chest on the bed. It was hard to even approach her at all.

“Hey.” She greeted back with a glance to Lincoln. “You wanted to talk?”

“Yeah.” Clarke took a step forward and kneeled beside the bed. It felt awkward to have Lexa and Lincoln standing behind her and listening to their every word, but their conversation was an unavoidable necessity. “I heard about why you were running from a guard, about why you thought they’d send you to lockup. You’re a second child, right?”

She looked over Clarke’s head to Lincoln for guidance before she answered, “Yes.”

“Who are your parents? Who is your older sibling?” Clarke asked.

Octavia shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You can trust me.” Clarke promised. “I’m not trying to get them into any trouble. I only want to help. If your family comes looking for you, that could cause problems. I need to know who they are so that I can keep an eye on them for you. For all of us.”

“My mother died a few weeks ago.” She confessed in small voice. “I never met my father. I lived with my brother. His name is Bellamy.”

Clarke’s heart sank like a ship hitting an iceberg. “Your brother…is Bellamy Blake…the Ark Guard Cadet?”

Octavia nodded.

“Okay.” Clarke ran a hand through her hair as she stalled for a moment. “Well, that complicates things. But don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on your brother. Since he’s a guard who opposes an Ark-Trikru alliance, I doubt he’d cross the bridge on his own to come looking for you.”

Octavia held her gaze. “You don’t know my brother. He’d do anything to protect me if he thought I was in danger. He thinks that keeping me safe is his sole purpose in life.” Tears brimmed her eyes. “But I can’t go back there. I can’t keep living under the floor. I won’t do it anymore. I _can’t_. When I heard Bellamy talk about Trikru, I knew this was my only shot at a real life. But if he thinks I’m here…he _will_ look for me.”

“Hey.” Clarke reached out and brushed away the stray tears that fell from her eyes. “It’s okay. He can’t get over the bridge on his own, and there’s no way he’d to go The Council even if he did think you were here. If they find out that he’s been helping to hide you all this time, he’ll get floated—or, at the very least, he’ll lose his job. I don’t really know. You’re the first second-born child there’s been in a long time. But, hey, look at the bright side. If Trikru and The Ark can finalize an agreement that keeps the bridge open for everyone, you’ll be able to live here and see Bellamy whenever you want. You might want to keep the sibling part a secret, but it could still work. You’d just be another Trikru citizen to the Arkers.”

With hope in her eyes, Octavia looked above Clarke’s head to where Lincoln and Lexa were standing. “Is that really going to happen?”

Clarke stood and turned to face the others just in time to catch the roll of Lincoln’s eyes.

“Don’t hold your breath.” He spat. “Arkers hate us without reason, even their leaders.”

“Lincoln.” Though Lexa appeared calm and composed, the utterance of his name was a clear warning.

He gave a nod of acknowledgement before moving to reopen the door. Lexa beckoned for Clarke to follow as she headed out into the hallway. Clarke threw a quick goodbye to Octavia while darting past Lincoln and through the doorway.

“You gave her hope.” Lexa said once they were far enough away from the room. “Even with the knowledge that your people are likely to reject our proposition, you gave her hope. Why?”

“She needed it.” Clarke answered as they turned down a new hall. It was empty, so Clarke took the opportunity to speak freely. “Octavia’s in a fragile state right now. She has no idea what’s at stake, and there’s no telling how much about the world she even knows. She needs hope that things can get better, that she can have a normal life just like the rest of us. And, I don’t mean to be rude, but how much do you trust this Lincoln guy? He seems to really hate Arkers and, well, by birth Octavia _is_ an Arker. Is she safe with him?”

Lexa stopped to give her full attention to Clarke. “Lincoln can be trusted. You have my word that Octavia is safe in his care.”

Clarke nodded. “Okay. That’s all I needed to hear.” She glanced around to check that they were still alone. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Yes.” Lexa granted warily.

“I noticed how people stop what they’re doing whenever you walk by. Is it always like that? Even with your friends?” She asked.

The look on Lexa’s face said it all. Clarke didn’t need an answer to know that Lexa had no friends to speak of.

“Oh. Well. Hey.” Clarke retrieved a masquerade mask from her inner jacket pocket and offered it to Lexa. “You want to see how we have fun on The Ark?”

\--

The party was in full swing by the time Clarke and Lexa entered through the door. Teens and young adults filled nearly every space available, and music blared from the repurposed telecom speaker. The air was thick with body heat and smoke, and it smelled strongly of sweaty deodorant layered on top of burning synthetic herbs. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was all part of the experience.

Lexa nervously adjusted the mask over her eyes and nose before saying, “I shouldn’t be here. This is too much.”

“Woah, hey. No, don’t say that. Come here.” Clarke gently grabbed Lexa by the arm and pulled her to an obscured back corner where they were forced to stand unusually close together in the tight space. “What’s wrong?”

“This is all so…” Lexa struggled to find the right descriptor. “Overwhelming. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never…I’ve never been to a real party before.”

Clarke gave her a curious look. “Not even back before you were the Commander?”

Lexa shook her head. “I’ve been trained my whole life to lead, not to have fun. Even when I was invited to an event…it didn’t feel right to go.”

“Do you want to be here?” Clarke couldn’t care less about the party itself. “We can go if you want to. I don’t want to force you to do something you’re not comfortable with.”

She took a moment to think it over before she replied with, “No. Let’s stay. The repercussions of Trikru’s dealings with The Ark will ultimately affect the common citizen the most. I need to see the faces of those who would bear the consequences of my decisions.”

Though it wasn’t exactly the response Clarke had hoped for, she was still impressed. “How tactful of you.”

A flash of movement in the garbage and abandoned broken parts was followed by the sudden appearance of Raven.

“Clarke!” She smiled widely as she brought the blonde in for a drunken hug. It took her a moment to even realize that another person was directly beside them. “Oh, hey. Nice mask, mystery girl. Who’s under it? Or…wait, is this who I think it is?”

“She’s a friend.” Clarke answered hastily. “So how’s the party going? I can see that you’re clearly enjoying yourself.”

“That I am.” Raven agreed by raising her finger and booping it against the tip of Clarke’s nose. “That I am, indeed. This is the best party we’ve ever had. And no guards have come snooping around yet so we’re good on that front. The booze kind of tastes like sweaty socks but, eh, we’ve had worse.”

Unexpectedly, Lexa asked, “What are socks?”

Raven grinned, both amused at Lexa’s confusion and proud of Clarke’s daringness to bring her to the party. “An extra layer of fabric we put on our feet to keep them warm.”

Even through the mask, Lexa’s puzzlement was evident. “Is that really necessary? It sounds like a waste of valuable material.”

“It probably is.” Raven agreed. “But they sure are comfy.”

“Raven.” Clarke put on a polite smile. “Why don’t you go find something for our guest to drink, yeah?”

Raven jumped at the opportunity. “Sure! No problem.” She turned to Lexa. “What do you like? Something strong? Mixed? Watered down?”

“Watered down.” Clarke answered for her after recognizing Lexa’s nerves.

“Coming right up.” With a smile, Raven left their secluded corner and returned to the party.

Clarke turned to Lexa, who stood with her back pressed flat against the wall.

“You look nervous.” Clarke commented, not sure of what else to say.

“I am.” Lexa readjusted her mask again. “As I said, this is all a bit overwhelming. I’ve never left Trikru before, and certainly not with the purpose of entering foreign territory in secret with a girl I hardly know. This isn’t exactly the best example of proper leadership that I’ve ever given. It’s probably the worst, actually.”

“We can go whenever you want.” Clarke reminded her. “I mean that. The party might be for me, but no one really cares about why a party happens; people just like to _be_ at a party. My absence wasn’t noticed before, and it won’t be noticed after we leave.”

“Where would we go instead?” Lexa asked.

Clarke thought about it for a moment. “I could show you my living quarters. You know, so you can really see how the other half lives.”

Lexa touched at her mask as she pondered the scenario. “That would be very interesting to see.”

Clarke couldn’t quite tell if Lexa was intentionally playing along or if her curiosity about The Ark and its people truly did extend that far. Before she could dwell on the matter for too long, Raven reemerged in their corner with two canisters of unidentifiable murky liquid. She offered one to each of them.

“Drink up.” Raven encouraged as Lexa took her can with both hands.

In the time it took Lexa to even swallow the tiniest of sips, Clarke had already chugged a third of hers. She cringed as the harsh taste burned its way down her throat to pool in her stomach. Satisfied, Clarke handed the canister back to Raven with a grimace.

“Take it.” Clarke pleaded. “That’s even more disgusting than I remember.”

“It’s stronger than it used to be.” Raven explained with a laugh. She took the can and threw back a large gulp of it before shuddering and adding, “Monty’s been perfecting his formula.”

“You drink this on purpose?” Lexa asked as she attempted to hand back her own can to Raven.

“Just try to get through a little more of it before you give up.” Raven pushed the offered can away. “And it’s not about the taste, it’s about the way it makes you feel after the alcohol has had time to enter your bloodstream.”

“I don’t know if I can.” Lexa admitted quietly. “This is _the_ most disgusting drink I’ve ever tasted.”

Raven’s words began to slur together. “You can do it. Just chug it if you’re really that put off by how it tastes. And plug your nose! That’ll take out half the taste right there. If you still don’t like it after that, no pressure.”

“Just…” Clarke put a hand on Raven’s shoulder to help steady the swaying girl, but looked to Lexa as she spoke. “Go easy on it. It’s strong stuff. And it can make you sick if you drink too much.”

With Raven and Clarke watching, Lexa managed to swallow back three mouthfuls of the awful hooch. She stuck out her tongue in disgust as she forced the can into Raven’s hand.

“Nice.” Raven elbowed Clarke, a tad bit harder than intended. “Looks like the Commander’s got some pluck in her step.”

Just as Lexa was about to ask for clarification on what pluck was and why it was in her step, Finn poked his head around the wall of garbage and broken parts with red glazed-over eyes and a partially empty canister in his hand

“Guys!” If Finn noticed Lexa standing beside them, he didn’t show it. “We’ve got a serious problem. Bellamy’s here.”

Pushing passed Raven and Finn, Clarke left the private corner in the rummage and surveyed the crowd. Sure enough, Bellamy Blake stood in the center of the makeshift dancefloor with his eyes scrupulously scanning each and every face around him.

“Why isn’t he wearing his guard uniform?” Raven asked as she appeared at Clarke’s side.

“He’s not here to arrest us.” Clarke answered, glanced back to ensure that Lexa was still close by. “He’s here to search for something.”

“For what?” Raven and Finn asked in unison.

Clarke lowered her voice as much as she could without having her words be drowned out by the loud music. “Remember Octavia from last night? I bet anything that he’s still looking for her. He probably thinks this is just the sort of place she’d turn up at.”

Lexa stepped forward. “Then perhaps it would be best for you and I to leave before he begins pulling off masks to check.”

“You’re right.” Clarke agreed before turning to Raven and Finn. “Thanks for the party guys, but we’d better go. Think you can distract our unwanted guest while we make a run for it?”

“Don’t worry.” Raven rubbed her hands together mischievously. “We’ll take care of it.”

\--

Clarke watched from a seat at the edge of her bed as Lexa carefully picked up the porcelain pig from the top of her dresser. She raised it up to get a better look at it in the light. A small smile touched her lips as she admired its soft pastel hues.

“This is beautiful.” She said while placing the figurine in the exact spot she had removed it from.

“It’s a family heirloom from one of our Earth ancestors.” Clarke informed her as her gaze moved on to the framed digital photo.

Lexa pointed to the faces in the picture. “Are these your parents?”

“Yes.” Clarke could feel the anticipation of facing her emotional scars constricting her calm with a sickeningly tight grip. She didn’t want to talk about Jake Griffin tonight, or any other night for that matter.

“Do they live here with you?” She wondered.

“My mother does.” Clarke swallowed hard, forcing a year’s worth of repressed grief back down into the grave she had dug for it. “But my father was floated.”

Lexa stopped, one hand resting on the dresser and the other hanging by her side. Quietly, she said, “How peculiar. My father died of a heart attack before I was old enough to remember him, but my mother…she broke the law, and she was killed for it.”

“Can I ask what crime she was charged with?” Clarke didn’t want to overstep, and she certainly didn’t want the same question asked about her father, but her curiosity often had the strength of an untamable wild beast.

Lexa gave a sad smile and repeated a phrase that Clarke had once said to her. “That’s a story for another day.”

Clarke understood perfectly. Some things were too hard to share. Some experiences were just too hard to relive.

“You can sit down if you’d like.” Clarke gestured to what little space remained on her bed.

“Thank you.” Even after she had accepted the offer, Lexa hesitated. A few moments went by before she finally sat down beside Clarke on the bed.

“I’m sorry your first party experience turned out to be such a dud.” Clarke tried to focus on the view of the moon through her window instead of how close they sat. Instead how fast her own heart was racing. Instead of the way Lexa smelled like the flowers in Trikru’s garden.

Lexa removed the masquerade mask from where’d she tied it to her wrist and handed the accessory to Clarke. “Despite how terrifyingly new it was…I did have fun. Your friends seem like interesting people. I would enjoy meeting them again in the future.”

“You’ll probably see Raven sooner rather than later.” Clarke muttered.

Lexa was confused. “Should I know what that is supposed to mean?”

Clarke shrugged, not seeing how it could hurt to tell Lexa the truth—especially since she couldn’t tell it to anyone else. “It means she’s kind of sleeping with my mom.”

“Sleeping with her?” Lexa questioned. When realization dawned on her, a blush reddened her cheeks. “Oh. You mean…”

“Yeah. I just found out this morning.” Clarke couldn’t contain a laugh, Lexa’s reaction was too pure and adorable. “And it’d be best if you didn’t tell anyone. It’s a secret relationship. If The Council found out that one of its members was having sex with a nineteen year old, well, they probably wouldn’t like it very much. It’s not forbidden, but it _is_ frowned upon.”

In an unmistakable show of interest, Lexa’s gaze fell to Clarke’s lips as she said, “Are secret relationships common for your people?”

Clarke had a hard time keeping her mind focused on the conversation. The way Lexa was looking at her awakened an arousal deep within her, like sparking a match in the dark. “I would assume they’re as common as they are for your people. After all, everyone has their fair share of secrets.”

Lexa’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I feel foolish, being here with you. It goes against everything that I’ve even been taught to do. Against everything my advisers have told me. Against my own better judgement…”

Clarke moved her hand so that it covered Lexa’s on the bed. “I didn’t ask you to the party because you’re the Commander, I asked you to the party because you’re my friend. You’re more than just a leader, Lexa. You’re a person too.”

The look of longing in Lexa’s eyes proved to Clarke that what they were doing was more than just meaningless, rebellious fun.

“It’s been some time since I had someone to call my friend.” Lexa confessed.

“How much time do you think we have before Trikru figures out you’ve gone missing?”

“Not long.” She guessed. “Another hour or so, perhaps.”

“That gives us plenty of time.” Clarke replied, purposefully leaving her comment vague.

Intrigued, Lexa asked, “Plenty of time to do what?”

Clarke smiled. With the vibe of the conversation back on her side, she knew just how to make her first strategic move. “To do whatever we want. Get to know each other better, sit in silence, try going back to the party, maybe make out a little, you know, whatever you want to do.”

It took Lexa a beat to catch what Clarke had said. With raised brows and an impressed smile, Lexa replied, “You’re very direct about what you want. I admire that.”

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Clarke smirked. “So, what’s your favorite color?”

“Red.” She answered immediately. “And yours?”

“Blue. Now you ask a question.” Clarke had never enjoyed a game of back and forth questions more than she did in that moment. With others, the answers never mattered much. But with Lexa, every answer could be a glimpse into a new world.

“Which planet is your favorite?” She asked.

“Oh, that’s a tough one. I don’t know. I used to say Jupiter because no one ever said Jupiter and I wanted to be quirky and unique…but I guess I have to say Earth. It’s the one planet I would actually like to be on.” Clarke paused. “Is Saturn your favorite planet?”

“It used to be.” Lexa answered, her gaze on Clarke. “Back when it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

“So now it’s Earth?” Clarke assumed.

“Earth is my new favorite planet, yes.” Lexa nodded. “But not the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Clarke was familiar with how this round of flirtation was supposed to go. “Oh yeah? Then what is?”

“Your kindness.” She answered, stumping Clarke. “Your dedication to the greater good. Your determination in the face of adversity. Your spirit. Your resilience. Your ability to push boundaries and to not accept things as they are. You, Clarke. You are the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen.”

Speechless and thrown off her game, Clarke could only stare.

In the silence, Lexa’s confidence wavered. “I’ve said too much.”

“No.” Clarke gave Lexa’s hand a comforting squeeze. “No, you didn’t.”

Just as Clarke began to entertain the thought of leaning in and kissing Lexa, movement from outside her bedroom door alerted them both to visitors. Clarke stood from the bed and pressed her ear to the door, hoping that it was only her mother coming home from another long day in the council chamber.

“I can hear voices.” She whispered back to Lexa. Straining her ear even further, Clarke eventually recognized who was talking. “I think it’s just my mom and Raven.”

Relieved that no Trikru bodyguards had come to break down the door and retrieve their Heda, Clarke retook her seat on the bed.

“Will they enter your room?” Lexa asked. It was clear in her tone that she hoped the answer would be no.

“Oh, no. I really doubt it.” Clarke assured her. “They’ll probably go into my mom’s room in a few minutes.”

Curious, Lexa asked, “It doesn’t bother you that your friend is in a romantic relationship with your mother?”

“Not enough for me to stop two people from being happy.” Clarke answered. “Is it weird? Yeah, of course it is. Do I wish they’d find other people to screw? Absolutely. But you can’t help who you love, or who you’re attracted to, or who you want to sleep with. They’re happy, so I’m dealing with it.”

“That’s very considerate of you.” Lexa noted. “Putting others needs before your own like that.”

“It’s not that hard.” Clarke brushed it off.

Lexa removed her hand from beneath Clarke’s and used it to tuck a stray lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “Give yourself credit, Clarke. You think like a leader, and a leader is not an easy thing to be.”

“Do you ever wish you weren’t the Commander?” Clarke wondered aloud.

“Yes.” She looked around the room instead of at Clarke. “Now more than ever. I was raised to be the Commander who put us back on the ground. The Commander who brought us home. I was trained my whole life to be the best leader that my people have ever known, to put them first no matter what the cost or what personal sacrifice may need to be made.” She swallowed back her emotions. “But here I am, ignoring everything I’ve ever learned because a pretty girl asked me to do something dangerous with her.”

“Are you…are you saying we shouldn’t be friends?” Clarke prayed to whatever deity would listen that that wasn’t the case.

“I don’t know. My head is screaming that I shouldn’t be doing this…” She glanced to Clarke. “But another part of me is saying there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Though the mood had shifted into something more serious, Clarke just couldn’t help herself. “And which part of you is saying that?”

Much to Clarke’s delight, Lexa laughed. “I don’t think that answer even needs to be said aloud.”

“Oh.” Clarke made a show of scooting closer to her on the bed. With the sides of their thighs touching and their shoulders touching and their faces so close, Clarke used the sultriest voice she could muster to say, “Why don’t you just show me then?”

Lexa’s lips parted and a breathy sigh slipped out. She stared at Clarke with such confliction that Clarke could only guess as to what would happen next. Would they kiss? Would Clarke get to run her hands through Lexa’s hair? Would the Commander’s long fingers slip beneath her shirt? Would a pile of clothes collect on the bedroom floor? How long would it take the great and powerful Commander to scratch at Clarke’s back and moan into her pillow?

“I—“ Lexa’s reply was cut off by the abrupt opening of the bedroom door. Abby marched inside with a stumbling drunk Raven right on her heels. She stopped short at the sight of Lexa and Clarke sitting so closely together on the bed. The recognition of who Lexa was shined clear in the doctor’s eyes.

Abby asked very calmly, “Clarke, what is going on here?”

Annoyed, Clarke stood from the bed and faced the unwelcome intruders. She crossed her arms and made sure to show her irritation with the tone of her voice. “Can I help you?”

“Yes.” Abby’s feigned calm vanished. “Yes, you can help me. Why don’t you start by explaining why an off-duty guard just dropped off Raven _drunk_ at our doorstep?”

Raven gave a weak wave from where she stood in the doorway, using its frame to keep herself propped up. “Howdy, folks.”

Abby continued, “After that you can tell me why the Commander of the Trikru Research Outpost is sitting on your bed.”

Lexa stood, her professionalism taking over instinctively. “Doctor Abigail Griffin, it’s a pleasure to meet you again.”

Abby blew out a heavy sigh, torn between sounding too much like a mom or sounding too much like a political figure. “Commander, what are you doing here? Where is your security team?”

Lexa remained stoic. “The Council has allowed for social visits between The Ark and Trikru. I have come across the bridge for nothing more or less than that.”

“Do you know how late it is?” Abby’s question was more directed at Clarke than it was at Lexa, but it was Raven who answered first.

“Oh, they know.” Raven said with what was supposed to be wink but ended up looking more like the beginning of a seizure than anything else.

Abby narrowed her gaze, suspicious. “And was the Commander planning on staying the night?”

Clarke felt like a little kid being put on trial for sneaking a snack past bedtime. She hated it.

“No.” Clarke answered. “She was not. We were just talking.”

“Talking.” Abby repeated dubiously. “And what were you two discussing?”

Clarke was done with playing nice. “Nothing you and Raven haven’t discussed, I’m sure.”

Raven perked up at the mention of her name.

“You tell it, Clarke.” She cheered. Abby tossed back an agitated glance, causing Raven to amend her original statement with, “I mean…maybe don’t tell it.”

“I should be going now.” Lexa announced, loud and clear. She waited expectantly for them to make a pathway out, but to her amazement no one moved at all.

“I need answers, Clarke.” Abby pressed on, unaffected. “This is a serious matter. If the rest of The Council finds out that Trikru’s leader was in our living quarters, they’ll find a way to throw out my vote. I can’t protect this alliance unless I’m there do to so. She can’t be here.”

“Fine.” Begrudgingly, Clarke understood. “We’ll go somewhere else.”

Abby wasn’t quite finished just yet. “You can’t be seen with her on The Ark at all. Your social visit to the garden yesterday morning put too much strain on The Council as it is. If they find out the two of you are…becoming friends…everything we’re working toward will be put at risk. Diana is one push away from disconnecting the bridge herself. We have to play this safe, and we have to play it _smart_. What you two are doing is neither of those things.”

Lexa cleared her throat. “While I do appreciate your concern for our alliance, I do not appreciate being talked down to.”

Abby took a step back and placed her hands on her hips. “Well if you’re going to lead your people, you should probably behave like a leader.”

“ _Mom_.” Clarke was appalled. Whatever romance Clarke and Lexa had begun to kindle was likely drowned out by the very accusation that Lexa was not being the leader her people deserved. More noticeably, Lexa’s ego had clearly taken a hit as well.

“Your mother is right, Clarke.” Lexa yielded. “I have behaved recklessly tonight. Wouldn’t you agree, Raven?”

Raven, who had slid down to a sitting position in the doorway, pried her eyelids apart and pumped a weak fist into the air above her head. “Yeah. For sure. No problem. Go team.”

“You see…” Lexa continued, eyes on Abby. “The desire for fun is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. We don’t always travel the wisest path to achieve our goals. As we see with Raven and with myself, even the best of us are capable of making mistakes.”

Abby’s anger was unrelenting. “I trust you won’t make the same mistake twice.”

Lexa remained expressionless. “I will earn that trust, Dr. Griffin.”

Abby lowered her hands and turned around to look at Raven, who was slumped over and snoring in the doorway. She glanced back at Clarke and said, “Help me get her to bed, would you?”

\--

The Commander’s Office was a bit warmer with the sun shining in directly through the large window behind the desk, but was otherwise just as it had been mere hours beforehand.

“I’m sorry.” The words fell from Clarke’s lips the moment that Lexa sat down in her throne-like chair. “I didn’t even consider what would happen if Raven showed up after the party. I should’ve known that my mother would come asking questions about her. I just…I was distracted, I guess.”

Lexa nodded. “We do seem to have that effect on each other.” She paused for a few seconds to further collect her thoughts. “Clarke, I’m afraid we have to end our social visits until The Council has decided what they wish to do. I cannot in good conscience put our friendship before the lives of my people. Your mother favors the alliance between Trikru and The Ark, but it is obvious that she faces opposition from the other councilmembers. My behavior with you has been inappropriate. I accept the full responsibility for the consequences my actions may have, but I do not wish to further put my people at risk or give yours the ammunition they need to strike down my proposal. I refuse to go down in history as the Commander who brought Trikru back to Earth’s orbit only to be overthrown and consumed by a foreign tyrannical government. If I’m to do my job properly, if I’m to protect my people, I can’t be distracted.”

Clarke waited until long after Lexa had made her case to say anything in return.

“So this is goodbye?”

Lexa’s gaze fell to where her hands sat clasped together on the desk. “Yes. For now, at least.”

Clarke stood from the couch, overcome with the need to fight but filled with the understanding of why she shouldn’t.

Clarke took a step toward the desk and reached into her jacket pocket to retrieve the masquerade mask. She placed it gently in front of Lexa’s hands on the desk and said, “May we meet again.”


	3. Burning Bridges

Clarke was standing outside the council chamber doors when John Murphy crossed her path. His general apathy for life could be a challenge to put up with on a good day, and since she was already tired from another restless night of tossing and turning, the promise of a nice conversation was slim.

“So?” He prompted as he leaned his shoulder against the wall beside her.

“So what?” She asked, partially thankful to have a way to pass the time but too on edge to fully appreciate it.

Murphy waited until a pair of guards walked by to say anything more. Finally, he lowered his voice and said, “Did you get a chance to ask if Trikru is taking on new members?”

“Oh.” Clarke could vaguely recall him asking that at the party. “No, I didn’t get the chance to ask yet. My social visits have kind of been put on hold. Turns out, The Council doesn’t like it when us little commoners meddle in foreign affairs.”

“Yeah, well, they can go float themselves.” He muttered. As an afterthought, he added, “Except for your mom, I guess.”

“We do kind of need her right now.” Clarke admitted with a sigh. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but she’s the voice of reason in that room right now. Marcus Kane is still on the fence, Diana Sydney wants to blow Trikru out of the sky, and Chancellor Jaha still wants to consume Trikru and make Lexa give over her political power to him.”

He raised a brow. “Lexa?”

Too tired to backpedal, Clarke gave in. What did it matter if Murphy knew the whole truth anyway? It wasn’t like he would run off and tell the world about it. Murphy wasn’t that kind of guy. Even if brutal honesty was a trademark of his, the abilities to lie and keep secrets were not lacking in his skillset.

“The Trikru leader. Their Commander.” Clarke explained. “Her name is Lexa. She’s about our age. She’s interesting, she’s smart…she’s the leader her people deserve.”

“You like her.” It wasn’t a question.

Clarke’s instinct was to completely deny and dismiss the notion, but she couldn’t lie to Murphy. Not after their seemingly endless afternoons of sitting beside each other and crying into their bland worn-out lockup uniforms. Not after the long nights of talking to each other through the vents, saying whatever just to fill the silence. He was as much of a friend to her as Raven and Finn were. As much as Wells used to be. As much as any one person could ever hope to be again.

“It’s complicated.” Clarke forced a tense shrug. “I would like for something to happen between us, but at the same time I hardly even know her. And, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are kind of a lot of people trying to take over her entire society at the moment. It’s just not a good time for either of us to feel the way we do.”

“You think she likes you back?” If anything, he sounded impressed.

Clarke tried to hide her smile but failed. “I know she does.”

“Is that why you’re fighting so hard for a Trikru-Ark alliance?” He asked. “For her?”

“No, not at all. Even if they had their own version of Jaha running that place, I’d still vote for the alliance. It’s what’s best for us all. This innate mistrust that we have for each other…I understand that it’s coming from practically a century of isolation, but it’s doing more harm than good. These people are strangers to us, sure, but they’re still people. Any one of us on The Ark could have been born on Trikru instead of here. We’re not all that different from each other, you know? We’re all human. We should work together.”

“You’re preaching to the wrong guy.” He reminded her. “So do you think this Commander will be reasonable about accepting new citizens?”

“I think so.” Clarke checked to ensure that no one was around to hear them. “She’s kind of already harboring a fugitive for us.”

Murphy’s interest was piqued, but before he had time to ask for details the council chamber doors slid open. Rather than give anyone the chance to exit, Clarke left Murphy and rushed inside to confront the four councilmembers in private.

“What’s the verdict?” She asked quickly as the doors closed behind her.

From his chair at the round table, Jaha offered a polite smile. “Hello, Clarke. I must say, your enthusiasm for the world of politics is inspiring.”

“What’s the verdict?” Clarke asked again.

Wordlessly, Abby rose from her chair to step around a tense Marcus Kane and to stand beside her daughter.

“Mom…” Thick and heavy dread filled Clarke as she recognized the sign of impending bad news in her mother’s eyes.

“Your mother has been out voted.” Marcus Kane confirmed with a touch of guilt in his tone. For someone on the fence about the matter, Clarke couldn’t shake the thought that Kane had the look of a regretful man who’d just sold his soul to the devil.

Jaha stood and clasped his hands together behind his back, standing upright and professional. It was the same stance he’d performed right before giving the call to float Jake Griffin. Preparing herself, Clarke preemptively dismissed everything Jaha was about to say as nothing more than cowardly power-hungry bullshit.

Clearing his throat, Jaha began. “The Council has formally decided to reject any proposal of an alliance between The Ark and the Trikru Research Outpost. We, as the rightful governing body of the human race, demand that the Commander surrenders her political authority and steps down from power, thus relinquishing all property and citizenship to The Ark. If she does not comply, we will have no choice but to view the denial of this offer as an act of war.”

“Have no choice?” Clarke was furious. “ _Have no choice_? How can you say that? You’re making a choice right now! You’re choosing war over peace.”

Diana Sydney, who’d been so quiet that Clarke had nearly overlooked her presence entirely, swiveled her chair around to face Clarke. “The choice is not ours to make. It is the Commander’s choice whether or not she wishes to join us. If she refuses, they will be treated as the war criminals they are and we will take their resources by force. We are the rightful government.”

“This doesn’t have to be like this.” Clarke knew her chances of reasoning with Diana or Jaha were all but nonexistent, so she directed her words to Kane. “You know this is the wrong call. There are innocent people on that station. People who traveled across the entire solar system to get back to Earth, a place they didn’t even know would be uninhabitable. They endured a civil war, they found peace, they _survived_. Against all odds, they lived. We can’t just wipe them out after everything they’ve been through just because they value their independence. You don’t have to steal their resources. They’re willing to share. They’re willing to work together so that all of us can return to the ground.”

Jaha nodded, pretending to sympathize with her. “I understand your frustration, Clarke. We all do. But you must understand that this decision was not made lightly. We simply cannot trust that a self-governing body of people with superior technology and resources will not one-day attempt to seize control of our home. As you’ve said, they have lived in isolation, apparently fighting amongst themselves, with one purpose: to return to Earth. Who is to say that The Ark will not be viewed as an obstacle in their path to the ground? Who is to say that our people won’t suffer for the leniency you suggest? An alliance is too great of a risk. For the safety of our people, for the safety of you and us, we have made our verdict. Either Trikru assimilates into Ark culture, or we go to war.”

A sly grin spread across Diana Sydney’s face. “Mark my words, war is the only solution to this problem. You’ll see.”

Abby placed a hand on Clarke’s shoulder, more as a warning than as a comfort. She looked to her fellow councilmembers as she said, “Thank you, Council, but we’d better disperse. Dinner will be over soon, after all.”

Abby steered Clarke out of the council chamber. She remained silent as she led her daughter down several halls until they came upon their living quarters.

“What’s going on?” Clarke asked, still fuming with anger.

Abby kept her voice low despite being in the privacy of their own home. “You have to go warn the Commander.”

“Wait, what?” Clarke was beside herself. Abby had bent the law on more than one occasion when it came to her daughter, but never with something of this magnitude.

“Tomorrow morning Kane is going to cross the bridge and tell the Commander of The Council’s decision. He’ll have guards with him, and as a safety precaution, guards will be posted on our side of the bridge from then on. You only have tonight to get across and get back without interference.” She explained.

Clarke was still confused. “But why? Why do you want me to warn her about the verdict? It’s not like she can change their minds. It’s obviously too late for that.”

“So she can disengage the bridge and leave.” Abby answered. “If Trikru can get out of Earth’s orbit, The Ark won’t be able to follow them. They don’t have to go far, even the moon would be a safe enough distance, but they _must_ leave. The Council isn’t going to budge about this war. Marcus is swayable, but Thelonious is blinded by power and Diana is more bloodthirsty than ever. We don’t have much time so you’ll have to go now. I can use my access code to get you across the bridge but we have to hurry and do it while everyone is still at dinner.”

Clarke was impressed with her mother’s commitment to the greater good, but she wasn’t about to follow along with her plan so easily. There were at least two others that would have to go with Clarke to the bridge, but her mother didn’t need to know about that part of the newly formed plan.

“I can get across the bridge on my own. You don’t have to be there.”

Abby sighed. “I don’t want to know how or any details. Just be quick and be safe. I’ll try to stall with as many guards along the way as I can.”

“I just…” Clarke couldn’t leave without asking. “Why are you helping like this? Why are you breaking the law and going against everything you believe in?”

“I don’t believe in killing hundreds of innocent people without even trying to find peace first.” She paused. “And because it’s what your father would have done. I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life, but sitting by and doing nothing about this isn’t going to be one of them. Remember, be quick and be safe. Don’t stay any longer than you absolutely have to. But don’t put yourself in harm’s way. Don’t try to be a hero, okay? Just deliver the message, warn them to leave, and get out. Don’t wait for them to take you as a prisoner or to hear what they say. Just go. Run. Make it back across the bridge before they even have time to do anything at all. You have to—“

“Mom!” Clarke couldn’t stand the rambling any longer. “I got it. Quick and safe. I’ll be back before you know it, don’t worry.”

Abby pulled her daughter into a tight hug. “I love you.”

Allowing herself a moment of a peace, Clarke replied, “I love you too.”

\--

Gathered outside the bridge doors was an audience that Clarke had not intended to bring with her. Murphy and Raven, the only two that Clarke had actually invited to come along with her to the bridge doors, were engaged in a heated debate about whether or not Murphy could be trusted. Finn and Wells, who had both tagged along with Raven, stood behind the mechanic in solidarity. Jasper and Monty stood off to the side, both enjoying the excitement with grins on their faces.

“Guys! Shut up!” Clarke exclaimed before typing her clearance code into the security control panel. Three. Twelve. One. Eighteen. Eleven. Five. And, just like that, the doors slid apart. Though Clarke had been counting on her clearance code to still be usable for the sake of saving time, she was still a little surprised that Lexa hadn’t changed it on her. That, after all, was the whole point of bringing Raven along in the first place.

Clarke turned to face the group. “Okay, here’s how this is going to work. Murphy and I are going to cross the bridge and warn the Commander about The Council’s verdict. He’s most likely going to stay there, but I’ll come back, of course. I don’t know how long I’ll be but regardless of that you don’t have to wait for me here. It’ll look too suspicious if you do.”

“What about me?” Raven asked, hurt that she was no longer included in the mischief. “You said you needed my help.”

“I said I _might_ need your help.” Clarke corrected her. “I didn’t know if the doors would still accept my code, but they did.”

Raven wasn’t going to give up without a fight. “Okay, but what if you get over there and they get mad about whatever this _big serious thing_ is that you want to tell them, and then they change the code on you while you’re trying to get back across? You’ll need me to corrupt their programming again.”

She had a point. Feeling as if they were already wasting too much time, Clarke conceded. “Fine. Raven can come, but the rest of you are staying behind.”

Finn perked up. “Woah, hey, no. That’s not fair. If she’s going, I’m going. I want to see what Trikru is like too.”

Clarke didn’t have the time to argue. “No. Absolutely not. Three people is already too big of a group.”

Before anyone else could put in their request to join, a pair of guards rounded the corner and stopped in their tracks. Bellamy Blake could only stare in shock while his fellow guard Nathan Miller frantically looked between him and the lawbreakers.

“Run!” Clarke shouted before rushing onto the bridge. The six others hurriedly followed her to the safety of an Ark-free zone. As they waited for Bellamy and Miller to catch up, Clarke pushed her way back to the front of the group so that she could be the one to speak with them. She wasn’t sure that things would work out perfectly, but the ace in her pocket gave her the confidence to try.

As Bellamy and Miller skidded to a halt outside the bridge, Clarke raised her hands above her head to show that she was weaponless and said, “I know where Octavia is.”

The color drained from Bellamy’s face. The hand that had been reaching for his radio stopped in midair. “W-what? What did you just say?”

“I know where Octavia is.” Clarke repeated clearly. “If you turn us in, you’ll never get to see her again.”

“Are you blackmailing me?” He was more frightened than angry. “What did you do to her?”

“She’s safe.” Clarke reassured him. “She’s on Trikru. And if you tell The Council…if you turn us in…you’ll never get to see her again. They’ll float her, Bellamy. And you. And us. Do you really want to be responsible for so much death? For Octavia’s death?”

He lowered his hand away from the radio and, in a flash of movement, retrieved his electric baton from its holster on his belt and aimed it threateningly at Miller, daring him to call for backup and turn them all in. Miller raised his empty hands in an easy acceptance of defeat.

Grimly, Bellamy looked to Clarke and said, “Take me to Octavia.”

Clarke wasted no time. With unprecedented speed, she navigated the halls of Trikru like a pro. More than once their group of Arkers stirred alarm in the residents, but they managed to make it all the way to the door of the Commander’s Office before anyone of an official ranking intervened. And, much to Clarke’s misfortune, it was Indra who stood in their way.

“State your business.” She ordered, eyeing each member as if they were already criminals. And, technically, they were.

“I have to speak with the Commander. It’s urgent.” Clarke sent a wary glance to the crew behind her. “They’re with me.”

Indra scoffed. “You expect Heda to come running at your call?”

The door screeched open behind Indra, effectively ending her speech about respecting the Commander before it had even begun.

“Enter.” Again, merely the sound of Lexa’s voice was enough to make Clarke’s head dizzy. On second thought, that may have been her lack of a good night’s sleep.

Pushing through her lightheadedness, Clarke marched into the office with her six fellow Arkers on her heels. Lexa sat at her desk, in that great throne-like chair, with her hands clasped together on top of the desk. It was exactly how Clarke had left her the night before. Only, her hair was a little different and the hints of makeup were gone and the masquerade mask was nowhere in sight. Clarke was discouraged at that, but pressed on regardless. Their meeting was about more important things than a silly infatuation.

“Clarke.” Lexa greeted, emotionless. “And friends.”

“Friends is putting it generously.” Clarke glanced specifically to Wells, who was too intrigued by the new surroundings to notice. In fact, all of the other Arkers were so overwhelmed from being in a place that wasn’t The Ark that they remained perfectly silent and still. It was the most well-behaved some of them had ever been, and Clarke was grateful for that.

“What are you doing here?” Lexa asked.

“I came to warn you.” Clarke sucked in a deep breath to calm her growing nerves. Having an audience was an unexpected pressure that she hadn’t planned on. “The Council has rejected your proposal for an alliance. They’re going to send a councilmember over here tomorrow morning to tell you that you have two options moving forward. Either you surrender all political autonomy and allow The Ark to absorb Trikru…or they’ll declare war and take everything by force. But you don’t have to make that choice. There’s a third option, one that I came here to give you the time to make.” Clarke swallowed back the emotion that threatened to break free. “You can disengage the bridge and leave. If you can get out of Earth’s orbit, you’ll be safe. Your resources and your people will be your own. The Council can’t do anything to you after that.”

Lexa remained stoic as ever as she took it all in. Finally, after several long and awkward moments of waiting, she replied, “Is that what you advise? To flee before an attack?”

“Yes.” It hurt Clarke to say it. “Yes, you have to save your people. With the Council, there are two members who just don’t understand. They won’t change their minds about this. And…the Chancellor…he’s made up his mind.”

“My father.” Wells’s voice nearly made Clarke jump in surprise. “You can say it, Clarke. My father is the one responsible for this. He’s the one who wants us to go to war. He’s the one who…wants to kill innocent people.”

Murphy shot Wells a harsh glare and said, “Hate to break it to you, but your dad’s been killing innocent people for a long time now.”

Clarke refused to turn back and look at Wells. This was neither the time nor the place for them to discuss parents. Still focused on Lexa, Clarke said, “Last night you told me that you don’t want to be known as the Commander who brought Trikru back to Earth’s orbit just to be shot down by a foreign tyrannical government. Unless you want that fear to come true, this is what you have to do. You have to leave while you still can.”

From the back of the room, Jasper asked, “Why not just join us and be part of The Ark? What’s the big deal with remaining independent?”

Clarke threw a pointed look over her shoulder to Finn and Monty, both of whom promptly elbowed Jasper’s sides in unison. Satisfied that Jasper wouldn’t be making any further comments, Clarke turned back to Lexa.

“Why are they here?” Lexa gestured to the others. “Are these your advisers?”

“No.” Clarke knew she didn’t have the time to fully explain but she knew Lexa deserved at least some sort of explanation. She pointed to Raven and Finn. “Those two are my friends.” To Murphy. “He wants to live here, if you’ll have him.” To Jasper and Monty. “Those two are just here to be here.” To Bellamy. “He’s Octavia’s brother.” To Miller. “He got dragged into this.” And finally, to Wells. “And he’s the Chancellor’s son.”

Finding his voice, Bellamy puffed out his chest and said, “Myself and Miller are trained Ark Guard Cadets. We will protect ourselves and our people if necessary.”

“If you so much as lay a finger on one of my people, I will personally ensure that you are—“ Lexa was cut off by the sound of the door sliding open. Indra, Anya, Lincoln, and Octavia barged inside, leaving very little room for everyone to stand comfortably.

“Heda!” Anya was dumbfounded at the sight of so many Arkers in the room, but more so at the sight of her and Lincoln’s primary antagonist Bellamy standing before them.

Lincoln threw up a defensive arm in front of Octavia, ensuring that Bellamy had no chance of snatching her away from them.

“Octavia.” Bellamy sounded like a young boy instead of a grown man. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Let her go!”

“I’m fine.” She promised. “Bell, I’m fine.”

“Heda.” Anya, whom Indra had clearly run and tattled to, quickly found her professionalism. “I must advise that the Arkers remove themselves from this room at once. This is ridiculous, there isn’t enough space in here for whatever this is.”

Showing a surprising glimpse of annoyance, Lexa looked to her and said, “Then where would you suggest we move this impromptu meeting? The galley, where all those eating dinner can overhear us? Perhaps to the garden, where the harvesters are working? Or would you prefer your bedroom? It may be smaller than my office but you’ll surely be more comfortable.”

Getting the point, Anya backed off.

Lexa turned her attention to Clarke. “Tell your leaders—“

A loud boom that rattled the very bones in Clarke’s body shot through the air, followed by the entire room spinning wildly. The gravitational force was enough to knock Clarke off her feet and have her sliding across the floor with the mass of other bodies that were left useless and flailing in the commotion. Screams, near and distant, were the only sounds that registered beyond the alarming beeps from the monitors around them. By the time Clarke could gather her bearings and realize that it was the entirety of the Trikru station that was spinning and not just the Commander’s Office, her exhausted body gave up on fighting gravity and allowed itself to drift off to sleep. The last image she saw before total darkness took her was the view from Lexa’s window, where Clarke could see The Ark growing smaller and smaller as they floated away from it.


	4. The Consequences

The first thing that Clarke noticed when she awoke was how soft and warm her bed felt. It seemed bigger too, allowing for her to spread out beneath the thick blanket. Several comfortable minutes passed before Clarke realized that she didn’t own a thick blanket, nor did anyone else outside of the medical wing; blankets were for the sick and dying, a thought which promptly kickstarted Clarke’s consciousness into gear. Her eyes shot open, and, fueled with newfound adrenaline, she sat up and began wildly looking around the room for the danger her fight or flight reflexes so surely knew was there. The room was dark, lit only by the sliver of sunlight that peaked in through the curtained windows. It was just enough light to keep her from tumbling out of bed in search for an exit in the dark, and enough for her to recognize that the intense panic coursing through her was futile.

“You’re okay.”

Clarke had to blink several times before the girl rushing to her side registered as familiar. Raven knelt beside the bed and grabbed Clarke’s hand before giving it a comforting squeeze.

“You’re okay.” She repeated reassuringly. Her smile failed to reach her eyes, where crushing sadness pooled at the corners instead. With quivering lips, she said once more, “You’re okay.”

Clarke watched as the tears streamed freely from Raven’s eyes. The first two of them to roll off her chin hit Clarke’s arm with a piercingly cold splash. Clarke opened her mouth to say something, but words failed her as her mind raced to piece together the events that would have led to her current circumstance.

“We’re okay.” Raven said, trying to convince herself more than anyone else.

“What happened?” Clarke asked as a throbbing pain in her head began to grow stronger and stronger with each beat of her heart. She brought up a hand to gently rub at a sore spot on the back of her skull, noting how much energy it took just to raise her arm.

Raven’s explanation came with frantic intakes of breath as she cracked under the weight of her own despair. “The bridge. Someone destroyed the connecting mechanisms with explosives. It disengaged without a proper warning, and a lot of oxygen was lost on both sides before the emergency doors could close. But we started spinning away from each other and the artificial gravity was thrown off and everyone was flying everywhere and…people got hurt. A lot of people got hurt.”

“Did I pass out? I can’t remember what happened after the explosion.” Clarke was having a hard time recalling the details with a headache, one that stung at the backs of her eyes, working as such an unrelenting distractor against her.

“You did.” Raven’s speech had calmed a touch but was still difficult to bear. The tears broke out again, only this time they fell accompanied by heavy sobs that caused her entire chest to heave convulsively. “Finn…he didn’t make it. He hit his head too hard when the explosion happened. It snapped his neck. Just like that. He didn’t even have a fighting chance. One second he’s there, and the next second he’s gone. Just like that, you know?”

Clarke wanted to reach out and comfort her friend, but she didn’t know how to. Instead, she simply held onto Raven’s hand and endured her tightening grip.

“Wells…” Raven took a deep breath in to help calm herself. “He’s in the medical bay in critical condition. It’s pretty bad. Internal stuff. The doctors here, they don’t really know what to do for him. He’s been getting worse all night. I don’t think…I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“Take me to him.” Clarke could hear the desperation in her own voice, and it surprised her. It had been so long since she’d allowed herself to care about Wells, but somehow the feeling was not all that unfamiliar.

Raven used her free hand to wipe away her tears as she sniffled and said, “I can’t. The medical bay is too overcrowded. They don’t have any room for visitors. Besides, even if I could get you to him, I don’t even know the way. The floorplan for this place is a fucking nightmare.”

Clarke looked around the room once more. “Where are we?”

“The Commander’s bedroom.” Raven answered before releasing Clarke’s hand and pulling her sleeve down to properly dry her face. “After the doctor cleared you, the Commander ordered for you to be brought here to rest. I volunteered to stay with you so that you wouldn’t wake up alone.”

Clarke felt relief to hear that Lexa was at least safe enough to be running around and giving out orders.

Noticing Raven wince as she adjusted how she was kneeling, Clarke asked, “Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”

“I’m fine.” Raven’s hand moved to massage the area near her knee that was bothering her. “Just a little sore, that’s all. I’m sure you’ll be worse off than me with a bump on your head like that.”

Clarke pressed on. “Where’s everyone else? Are they all okay too?”

“Yeah.” She nodded, still have difficulty reigning in her emotions. “Yeah, mostly. Wells was the only one from our group to get admitted. Jasper thought he broke his arm, but the doctor said it was just bruised. They were sent to the galley or something. I don’t know, all the stuff here has weird names. I swear I heard one of those ladies from the Commander’s Office say we should all be rounded up and sent to the brig. What the hell is a brig? Better question, what the hell is her problem? She was actually insinuating that _we_ were the ones who blew up the bridge, as if we _wanted_ to get stuck over here. She thinks it was all your idea. As if Finn’s death was _our_ fault.” Raven bit her lip to keep herself from crying.

“A brig? Are you sure?” Clarke’s memory was still a little hazy, but she could distinctly recall a time when Lexa had told her that Trikru had no form of a prison or lockup.

Raven nodded. “Yeah, a brig. What does that mean? It was the lady who stopped us outside the Commander’s Office who said it.”

Before Clarke could explain, their conversation was interrupted by the door sliding open. Accompanied by Anya and a large man, Lexa walked into the bedroom with her back straight and her chin raised. Clarke wondered if the professional stance was an intentional choice or if such an uncomfortable posture had been built into Lexa from years of being told that leaders do not slouch, that leaders must be perfect.

“You’re awake.” The briefest of smiles pulled at Lexa’s lips as she forgot to hide her relief in seeing Clarke aware and unharmed; and it did not go unnoticed by the others in the room, specifically by Anya. Recovering quickly, Lexa folded her arms behind her back and approached the bed. “Now that you’ve regained consciousness, there is much to be discussed. I’m afraid we lack the convenience of time, and we simply cannot wait for you to properly recuperate. This discussion must be held now. In private.” She turned to Raven, who was still teary eyed and kneeling beside the bed. “Gustus will escort you to your people in the galley.”

Raven pushed herself up onto her feet with a loud grunt, and the subsequent pain that shot out from her leg left her bordering on tears once more. Pushing through it, she asked, “What are you going to talk about with Clarke that I can’t be here for?”

While Lexa was seemingly unbothered by Raven’s lack of adherence to a commander’s order, Anya was certainly bothered. She stepped forward and said with a threatening tone, “Heda has spoken. You will go with Gustus to the galley. Now.”

Defiantly, Raven crossed her arms and remained where she stood.

“Raven…” Clarke pleaded. She didn’t want her friend to get in trouble, but more than that she didn’t want the people of Trikru thinking that Arkers were too unruly to deal with. If a brig did exist, that was the last place Clarke wanted to end up. She’d had enough of being imprisoned in a cell for one lifetime.

“No.” Raven’s stubbornness was an equal match to Clarke’s, and truth be told the trait never did either of them much good. “If something needs to be said, I want to hear it too.”

“Raven.” Clarke tried again, growing a little lightheaded in the process.

“No.” Raven repeated. “I’m staying. I want to know what’s going on. Is the bridge repairable? Are you in contact with The Ark still? Do they know who set off the explosion? Was it even intentional? If it was, who did it? And what’s going to happen to them? More importantly, what are you going to with the Arkers on board? Are we prisoners of war now? Is there even a war at all? How far out of Earth’s orbit are you going to let us travel before you turn the thrusters on? Are you going to put in any effort in returning us to The Ark? If not, are there any escape pods hanging out around here? I can fly all of us back to The Ark if I need to. We don’t have to be a burden. We don’t have to be a problem. There are options here no matter what the situation is. So…” She took a moment to catch her breath. “Do we have a problem?”

Anya’s anger had grown, but she remained obediently silent as Lexa deliberated her answer.

Finally, Lexa answered Raven's first question. “The bridge is irreparable.”

“I need more answers than that.” Raven said with her chin raised.

Anya opened her mouth to speak but a single raised hand from Lexa kept the adviser quiet. After lowering her hand to its place behind her back, she replied calmly, “Gustus will take you to the galley.”

With great effort, Clarke scooted herself off the bed to stand beside Raven. She looked directly at the mechanic and said, “It’s okay. Go be with the others. I can handle this, but I need you to take care of everyone else. They’re probably all scared out of their minds right now. They need you, Raven.”

Raven’s resolve began to weaken. “I just…” She looked over Clarke’s shoulder to Lexa and the others. “Have you heard from anyone on The Ark? Just tell me that much. Are you still in contact with The Council?”

And so the lightbulb clicked on and perfectly illuminated the issue for Clarke to see. Despite everything, despite the confusion of being trapped in foreign territory, the devastating grief of losing a close friend, the worry of having another teetering on the edge of death, the pain in her leg, despite it all..Raven was worried about Abigail Griffin.

“Raven.” Clarke reached out a hand and placed it cautiously on her shoulder. “If there’s a way for us to talk to her, I’ll find it.”

“I don’t want to lose anyone else.” Raven whispered the words through trembling lips. “I just want to know that she’s okay.”

At the risk of sounding too harsh, Clarke said, “The longer you stand here resisting, the longer we’ll both have to go without knowing.”

With a defeated nod, Raven began limping toward the door.

\--

Inside the Commander’s Office, Clarke placed her hand against the cool glass of the window. The scenic view of the moon was gone, replaced by the much less picturesque view of stars and empty space. She let her hand slide down the glass, noting how heavy it felt.

“Is there something wrong with the gravity?” Clarke asked, turning on her heels to face Lexa.

The Commander stood in the center of her office, amidst a chaotic mess of books and papers that had tumbled throughout the room after the bridge explosion. A chaotic splash of blood, presumably from Wells, still sat undisturbed in the corner.

“The artificial gravity is still restabilizing.” Lexa answered before kneeling down to begin collecting her books.

Without being asked, Clarke dropped to her knees to help. She found herself surprised at just how deceivingly heavy pieces of paper bounded together could be, even with the added gravitational pull in mind.

With a glance to the closed door, of which Lexa’s advisers were unhappily waiting behind, Clarke lowered her voice and asked, “Are you still in contact with The Ark?”

Lexa stretched out a long arm and dragged a book closer as she said, “Yes, our communications are operational. Trikru will return to optimal performance within the next twelve hours. Nothing of importance was damaged aside from the bridge itself.”

“Well what do you know so far?” Clarke leaned back to sit on her heels as she waited for an answer.

Visibly exhausted, Lexa placed her stack of books neatly between them before replying, “I want to trust you.”

Clarke was lost. “You _can_ trust me.”

She picked up another book and slammed it down on top of her stack. “Then why did you set off explosives on the bridge?”

“Me?” Clarke’s grip on the book in her hands tightened. “You think I’m the one who did this?”

“Not alone.” Her jaw clenched. “I cannot ignore the facts, Clarke. You and your friends were the last ones to cross the bridge before the explosion. You brought more fugitives into Trikru territory just before the only link to The Ark was severed. That would be highly coincidental if it were not intentional.”

“I came to warn you!” Clarke’s hands flew up in exasperation, nearly knocking over her own stack of books in the process. “I was the one who risked getting floated to come tell you about The Council’s plans. I committed treason. Again! And I did it for the good of the people.” She paused. “For the good of _your_ people. Whoever blew up the bridge, they weren’t with me. I wouldn’t have put people’s lives at risk like that.”

Smoothing out the crumpled pages inside a book, Lexa avoided Clarke’s eyes and replied quietly, “I’m sorry for accusing you.”

Clarke let out a heavy sigh. “It’s okay. We’re all looking for answers.”

Taking the hint, Lexa said, “We have been in contact with The Ark, but they refuse to provide information until they’ve heard directly from the Chancellor’s son.”

“Is Wells even conscious?” Clarke asked, her heart pounding her chest. She wasn’t on the best of terms with her former friend, but that didn’t mean she was incapable of caring. 

“Yes.” Lexa sent a wary glance Clarke’s way. “But he’s in no condition to be transported out of the medical bay. We’re doing everything we can just to keep him alive.”

“I need to see him.” Clarke told her. “Before he…before he dies, I have to talk to him.”

Rather than reply, Lexa stood and stretched out her hand to help Clarke up. Gratefully, Clarke took the offered assistance.

“Wait.” Clarke held tighter to Lexa’s hand as the girl began to turn toward the exit.

“What is it?” Lexa asked, cautiously allowing Clarke to keep holding her hand.

“Before we go out there and get surrounded by your advisers…” Clarke took a deep breath to steady the dizziness that had taken hold of her. “I need to know what you plan on doing next.”

Lexa lowered her gaze to the floor. Sounding ashamed of herself, she whispered, “I don’t know what to do. I feel like my back is against a wall no matter which way I turn.”

“Hey. It’s okay.” Clarke used her free hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Lexa’s ear. Though the gesture was intended to be a comforting one, it was evident from the Commander's expression that nothing Clarke did could ease the weight of a leader’s burden. “Lexa, we can get through this together.”

She looked up at Clarke with an intensity that vanquished any trace of weakness. “That won’t be necessary. I am more than capable of performing my duties as Commander.”

Clarke released Lexa’s hand. “I’m not saying that you aren’t capable. All I’m saying is that it’s a difficult situation but you’re not in this alone. I can help you.”

The forced confidence fled Lexa as vulnerability took over once more. The back and forth of her emotional state made it clear to Clarke that the Commander was starting to crack under the pressure. “Help me do what? I have no idea what I’m doing. All of the training, all of the tests, all of the years of waiting…none of it prepared me for this. Or for you. I was never trained to resist the attention of a beautiful girl. No one ever told me what to do if we found the Earth to be uninhabitable. No one ever taught me how to stop a war.”

“There won’t be a war.” Clarke took a small step closer. “We can do this one step at a time. Together.”

Lexa stood perfectly still, her eyes on Clarke. Reusing words she’d uttered not even twenty-four hours beforehand, she said, “If I’m to do my job properly…if I’m to protect my people…I can’t be distracted.”

The air shifted between them and abruptly Clarke felt overwhelmed with the certain fact that something was wrong. A knock sounded on the door, followed by a piercing screech as it slid aside. Anya, Indra, Lincoln, Gustus, and a man Clarke didn’t recognize entered one by one. As the feeling of impending doom spread within her, Clarke finally understood what was about to happen.

Making use of what little time she had before she would be taken away, Clarke asked Lexa, “Why did you tell me that Trikru didn’t have a prison? Why lie about your brig?”

Lexa stood up straighter and tucked her hands behind her back, assuming her authoritative pose now that the advisers had arrived to witness their interaction. “For the same reason you lied when I asked if your people could be trusted.”

“Heda.” Indra drew their attentions away from each other. “It is time.”

Lexa nodded and turned toward her crew of advisers. “Updates?”

Anya was first to speak. “The Arkers have been placed in the brig, Octavia included. Weapons and radios have been confiscated from the two guards as well.”

Gustus added, “The one named Raven proved to be as uncooperative as you predicted, Heda. She has been sedated for the time being.”

Lincoln, who seemed particularly disgruntled with the current predicament, shook his head when Lexa’s gaze fell upon him; effectively passing on his opportunity to speak up.

Moving on, Indra announced, “The Chancellor has sent another request to speak with his son.”

Lexa gave a nod of acknowledgement and looked to the last adviser, a man who was still unfamiliar to Clarke. “Have you any news, Titus?”

“Yes, Heda.” He gave a respectful bow before saying, “The Reapers have been briefed on their assignment. Should The Ark foolishly attempt to attack, we will be ready to retaliate in full force.” He hesitated. “I should remind you, as the Fleimkepa I will honor my duty and obey my Heda to protect Trikru…but I cannot protect a station from an enemy already within our walls. Even contained, the Arkers are too much of a security risk. They should be eliminated. All of them.”

“ _Eliminated_?” Clarke’s luck was quickly turning from bad to worse. Using her anger and feelings of betrayal as fuel, Clarke aimed her glare directly at Lexa. “Are you serious? Now you’re floating innocent people too? So you're a liar and a hypocrite, is that right?"

“No one is being eliminated.” Lexa remained composed beneath Clarke’s furious gaze. “Titus’s suggestion has been noted but will not be acted upon.” She turned to her advisers. “Anya, go to the medical bay and report back to me with their supply request form and an update on the Chancellor’s son. Lincoln, Titus, go to the turrets and assist the Reapers in preparing for the offensive maneuvers should I elect to perform them. Indra, come with me to the control room to speak with the Chancellor. And Gustus…” She had to pause to keep herself expressionless and professional. “Alert the guards that the final Arker is in transit to the brig.”


	5. Battle Lines

Clarke sat with her back against the cold wall and her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. She was tired, her body ached, and the constant bickering of those in the brig with her only made her headache worse.

“I’m telling you, this place smells like piss.” Jasper insisted.

“No way.” Monty gestured to the room around them, with its lack of furniture and its single flickering light. “The smell of body odor is much stronger than the smell of urine in here.”

Murphy groaned beside Clarke and let his head fall back against the wall with a loud thud. “Which will kill us first, Trikru or their idiocy?”

“Don’t joke about that.” Clarke kept her voice low enough so that Jasper and Monty’s aroma debate would hold the others’ attention.

Murphy sent a wary glance her way. “I’m getting a serious case of déjà vu. Me, you, those two, all locked up with no way out. It’s like we never even left The Ark.” He chuckled to himself. “Talk about twisted irony. Except, you know, this time it’s guaranteed that we’re getting floated.”

“We’re not dying here.” Clarke weakly protested. Truth be told, she wasn’t all that certain about their future anymore.

“You’re right.” He pointed to the small lightless window above them. “We’ll be out there when we die.”

“Lexa said she wouldn’t float us.” Clarke replied, more to comfort herself than to reassure Murphy.

He smirked and shook his head. “In case you didn’t already notice, your girlfriend sucks. She’s the one who ordered for all of us to be thrown in here.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” Clarke grumbled.

Raven stirring across the room near Miller, Bellamy, and Octavia pulled Clarke and Murphy away from their private conversation. Immediately, Clarke shifted to her knees and crawled over to her waking friend.

“Hey.” Clarke leaned over Raven and forced herself to smile. “You’re okay.”

Raven blinked a few times before timidly saying, “Abby?”

Clarke’s smile fell. “No, it’s me. It’s Clarke.”

“Oh.” Raven blinked a few more times. “You sounded just like her. Sorry.”

Clarke didn’t know what else to say. “It’s okay.”

After being helped up to a sitting position, Raven rubbed her eyes and tried to shake the synthetic drowsiness from her mind. A few uncomfortable moments passed before she asked, “What happened?”

“You resisted the guards.” Octavia explained. “They had to use a sleep serum on you.”

Raven looked to Clarke. “So much for you having everything under control.”

Clarke balked. “This isn’t my fault. How was I supposed to know that Trikru had a brig?”

“I told you they did!” Raven shouted, furious at the situation. “I told you as soon as you woke up that the adviser lady wanted us all rounded up and put in the brig. But did you listen to me? No! You didn’t. You chose to believe some girl you don’t even know.”

“Knock it off.” Bellamy grunted as he got up to his feet began pacing the cell. “We’ve got bigger problems to think about. Does anyone have any ideas on how to get out of here? We need to start brainstorming escape plans.”

“I’m not escaping.” Octavia jumped to her feet to confront her brother. “I’m not going back to The Ark. I’m staying here. I'm staying on Trikru.”

He was shocked. “Look at how they’re treating you here.”

“The Council will float me if I go back.” Octavia replied. “At least here I have a chance.”

Jasper raised his hand into the air like a nervous schoolboy. “Sorry, but uh…who are you again?”

Bellamy answered for her, “Octavia Blake. My sister. Got a problem with that?”

“No, sir.” Jasper shook his head vigorously. “No problem, sir.”

Murphy snickered. “No need to call him ‘sir’ now. Not with that electric baton confiscated.”

Bellamy pointed a finger at Murphy. “You want to get left behind? Be my guest.”

“I’m with her.” Murphy lazily gestured to Octavia. “I’ll take Trikru over The Ark any day.”

Bellamy placed his hands on his hips and whirled around to look at everyone else. “Well who wants to go back home?”

Quickly, Monty and Jasper said in unison, “I do.”

Miller nodded. “I’m not abandoning the people I care about. Let’s go home.”

All eyes expectantly fell to Clarke and Raven.

“Home.” Raven stared directly at Clarke. “Where people are waiting for us.”

Clarke felt guilty that Raven seemed to care immensely more about seeing Abby again than she did, but guilt alone wasn’t powerful enough to alter Clarke’s confliction.

“I want peace.” She said finally. “I’m not giving up on that. War is not the only option. I'm not leaving until I've tried to do everything that I can to keep the peace."

A rattling sounded outside the brig, followed by the opening of the door and entrance of Lincoln.

“Octavia!” He rushed to the cell bars and reached through them to hold her hand. “Are you alright?”

The smile on her face did not go unnoticed by the others, especially by her brother.

“I’m okay.” She answered. “What’s going on? Why are we in here?”

Lincoln glanced to Clarke with a deep scowl forming on his face. “Heda has taken the Fleimkepa’s advice on preparing the Reapers for battle. You've been confined to the brig as a safety precaution."

“They're preparing for battle?” Clarke questioned. “What battle? How is that possible?”

Bellamy chimed in, “The Ark would never attack an enemy ship that has hostages on board.”

Lincoln ignored Bellamy and instead answered Clarke with, “Your Chancellor is the one who threatens war. If his son is not returned to him, he will attack.”

No one seemed up to the task, so Clarke forced herself to ask, “Is Wells even still alive?”

“Yes, but not for long.” Lincoln revealed. “And he would never survive being transported back to The Ark.”

“So you _do_ have transportation?” Bellamy questioned.

Reluctantly, Lincoln said, “We have a cargo spaceplane that was designed for reentry, but it’s small and it’s never been used before. It might not even work anymore.”

“Where is it?” Octavia asked.

“It’s attached to the outside of the station at the lower level airlock. Heda is the only one with the access code to open those doors.”

“I can fly it.” Raven announced as she massaged her sore knee.

“What if it’s broken?” Monty asked.

Raven smiled through the pain in her leg. “Then I can fix it.”

Bellamy turned back to Lincoln. “Whose side are you on?”

Lincoln looked to Octavia, admiration clear on his face. With the hint of a smile, he said, “Hers.”

Clarke hated to interrupt the moment but time was a luxury they did not have. “Can you get us to the spaceplane unseen?”

He shrugged. “Possibly, but without Heda’s code it would be pointless.”

Clarke swallowed back her emotions and asked, “Can you get me to the Commander?”

Slowly, Lincoln nodded. “That I can do.”

“Take me to her.” Clarke pleaded.

Lincoln pulled Octavia’s hand through the bars so that he could place gentle kiss on her knuckles. He paused to pull a small device from his pocket and place it in her grip before allowing her to pull her hand back through the bars of the cell wall.

“It’s an upgraded mobile phone.” He explained quickly. “It can connect with any specified communications receiver within a certain range. Our Earth ancestors brought a dozen of them to be used with the cargo plane. We made some improvements to them over the last century but we’ve never had a use for them; the others won’t notice that one is missing. Use it to get in contact with The Ark, but only with someone you trust. The only way to stop this war now is for us to do it ourselves.”

“Thank you.” Octavia was in awe, as if no one had ever shown her so much kindness before in her whole life. Perhaps no one had.

“Why are you helping us?” Bellamy asked cautiously.

“I don’t believe that going to war is the right thing to do.” Lincoln answered quietly. “And because I don’t want to see what’ll happen if the Reapers are set loose.” He glanced around at all of the nervous faces that were watching him. “If the Reapers set foot on The Ark, they will kill each and every person they see. If the Reapers are let out…there won’t be anyone left for you to go home to.”

\--

Clarke was standing beside one of the curtained windows when Lexa finally entered the bedroom. The Commander, who surely only looked half as exhausted as she felt, already had her boots kicked off and placed neatly near the foot of the bed before she even noticed that someone else was already in the room.

“Clarke?” Her face lit up with a complex mixture of emotions. In a flash of movement, she rushed back to the door.

For a moment, Clarke believed that Lexa was running to fetch a guard or a wayward citizen to help her recapture the escaped prisoner who had turned up in her bedroom uninvited. It was only after Lexa had punched in the code to securely lock the door and had begun walking over to Clarke that her panic subsided.

“We need to talk.” Clarke did her best to keep her tone as professional as Lexa did whenever a witness was around to hear. She didn’t want Lexa to know just how betrayed she felt, or how scared of the uncertain future she was.

Lexa stopped, keeping a safe distance between them, and said, “If they find you outside of the brig, they’ll want to make an example of you. They’ll hurt you, Clarke.”

“Who will hurt me?” Clarke crossed her arms, defensive. “Your guards? Your advisers? If you’re missing the theme here, they’re _your_ people. You have the power to stop them. You have the power to stop all of this.”

“I don’t.” She let out an exasperated sigh. “A rebirth of dark days is upon us. The descendants of Azgeda are gathering their forces. My people are on the brink of a second civil war. I have no power here. I have no choice. If Trikru is to survive, I have to keep everyone together. And right now the only thing that everyone agrees on is that The Ark must fall before it tries to take us.”

Clarke could no longer contain her anger. “I can’t believe I trusted you to do the right thing. How did such a coward ever become the Commander? You’re in charge, you don’t have to do what your advisers tell you to do.”

Lexa wasn’t about to back down so easily. “If I did everything my advisers told me to do, you and your people would already be dead. I am the only reason you are standing here alive right now.”

“What, am I supposed to say thank you for that?” Clarke forced a laugh. “You’re about to kill everyone on The Ark, and I’m supposed to be grateful that I’m locked up here instead?”

“Your people are the ones who started this.” Lexa argued. “You’re the one who told me to leave, to run away before The Ark could attack. You wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t believe The Ark was dangerous.”

“Dangerous? Yes. Deserving of being killed? No. There are innocent people on The Ark. There are people who wanted a Trikru-Ark alliance. My mother fought for days in front of The Council for that alliance. She risked her life to send me with that warning for you. How can you be okay with killing her?”

Lexa faltered. “An offensive strike has not been ordered.”

“Yet.” Clarke spat.

“This is not easy for me.” Lexa looked to be on the verge of tears. “Do you think I want to be in this position? Do you think I want to be making these decisions? I don’t. But someone has to, and you’re lucky it’s me and not an Azgedian. If Roan or Ontari had their way, the Reapers would’ve been sent aboard The Ark when the bridge first opened. I’ve been fighting for peace this entire time. Your people are the ones who destroyed any chance of that happening. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“You can stop the Reapers.” Clarke suggested.

Lexa shook her head. “There is no stopping a Reaper.”

“If they’re warriors, then they fight for you. You control them.”

“You don’t control a Reaper. You set it loose and you hope that you don’t find yourself in its path of destruction.”

Clarke took a moment to think before asking, “Why do you sound so afraid of something meant to protect you?”

“Reapers aren’t meant to protect anything.” She took a deep breath before continuing on. “During the dark days, Azgeda created a serum designed to enhance their physical abilities. The purpose was to increase their rate of survival on a new inhabitable planet, should they win the civil war against the Grounders and take the station further into space instead of back to Earth. But it backfired on them. Only one of the four human test subjects survived the first dose, but the increased aggression and the addictive components were too dangerous. It took the joining of Azgeda and the Grounders to stop the first Reaper from killing everyone on the station. It’s how the dark days ended. The serum we have now is a lower dosage, but the fact that Reapers are uncontrollable still remains. And those who become a Reaper…they are noble volunteers willingly sacrificing their lives to protect their people, but more than that they are all known followers of the Azgedian descendants. If the Reapers are not used to take down The Ark, I fear that they will be used to overthrow me and my advisers.”

“But how would the Azgedian descendants stop the Reapers from killing them too?” Clarke asked.

“I have heard rumors.” Lexa confessed. “There are whispers of a sensory device that could stop a Reaper in its tracks. I don’t know if it exists, but if it does…I can’t allow Roan and Ontari to take control of Trikru. They will let the Reapers kill everyone who has ever trusted me. My advisers…their loved ones…everyone in the brig...and then they'll take The Ark by force.”

Clarke was at a standstill. She could hear the defeat in Lexa’s voice. She could see the confliction in her eyes. If Lexa attacked The Ark, she could remain in power and keep the people she cares about from being killed by a rebellious group of Azgedians. But if Lexa didn’t send the Reapers to The Ark, there was a good chance that herself, her entire administration, and all of the Arkers would be killed instead. Lexa was making a tough call, but she was making the logical one out of the two.

Thinking quick on her feet, Clarke said, “There has to be another option. What about the spaceplane? You can let the Arkers who want to leave go back home. Then The Ark will have no justified reason to attack. Besides, we’re not even in Earth’s orbit anymore. The Ark can’t get to us this far away.”

“We know about the long range nuclear missile on The Ark. We've been able to read it on our sensors since the bridge first opened." Lexa narrowed her gaze. “Who told you about the cargo plane? Was it Lincoln who set you free? I should’ve known his infatuation with Octavia would cause problems.”

“Hey. Focus.” Clarke meant business. “I don't know anything about a nuclear missile, but we have to figure out how to stop this war. Can we use the spaceplane to transport people back to The Ark?”

Lexa stared at her in disbelief. “How would I explain that to the rest of Trikru? If all the Arkers in the brig and the cargo plane suddenly went missing, I would be the sole person responsible. I’m the only one with the code to the lower level airlock. Everyone will know that I let you escape. Roan and Ontari will only grow more powerful if I’m viewed as weak.”

“Who are Roan and Ontari?”

“The unofficial leaders of the Azgedian descendants. Roan’s mother is the one who killed Costia.” Lexa remained composed on the outside but Clarke had a feeling that she was anything but calm beneath the surface. “If the people think I am weak, Roan and Ontari won't even need the Reapers to take control of Trikru.”

“So float them first and make an example of them.” Clarke suggested.

Lexa was appalled. “We do not float people on Trikru, especially those who have not broken any rules.”

Clarke pressed on. “Well what if you get me into the control room so I can talk to The Council? I might be able to make a deal. Some kind of peace treaty. I can negotiate something that benefits both sides.”

Lexa was unconvinced. “You expect me to trust you again so easily?”

“Trust me?” Clarke was furious. “You’re the one who betrayed _my_ trust! You ordered for my friends to be locked up. You still refuse to let me see a friend who is _dying_. You’re going ahead with a plan that will kill my entire people."

Despite Clarke's anger, Lexa kept her cool. Calmly, she said, “Did you or did you not insist that I could trust your Council? Did you or did you not promise that an alliance was a serious option? Did you or did you not pursue me romantically with the intentions of manipulating me into doing what The Ark wanted?”

“Your advisers are the ones manipulating you.” Clarke fired back. “I risked my life trying to get our people to work together. I risked getting floated just to come see you. Sure, I exaggerated The Council’s eagerness to reach a peaceful agreement, but I had to. I had to tell you that so that you wouldn’t give up on the alliance. I never did anything to hurt you. Whoever is in your ear telling you that I can’t be trusted has their own agenda in mind.”

Lexa took a moment to consider Clarke’s words before she quietly said, “Nothing I do can change the fact that people are going to die.”

“I don’t blame you for wanting the people who die to not be your own, but I do blame you for giving up and accepting that this has to end with death.” Clarke took a step forward. “What happened to the girl who wanted to skip through a field of flowers on Earth? Where did the girl who kissed Saturn go? Because that’s the person I want to talk to right now. That’s the person who would fight for what’s right.”

Lexa stood up a little straighter and raised her chin, her eyes full of anguish. “She died the day I became Heda.”

“I don’t believe that.” Clarke took another step closer. “I think she’s still in there. I think she’s the girl I met in the garden. I think she’s the girl who put on that masquerade mask and came to the party. She’s the girl who said she wanted to see the faces of those who would bear the consequences of her decisions. She’s the girl who said my kindness was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. That girl is you, Lexa. You’re just trying to hide beneath a title.”

“What do you want me to do?” Lexa asked, no longer bothering to hide her emotions. “My back is against the wall. I can’t be myself and be Heda. I have a duty. I have a responsibility to my people. I can’t let them down. I can’t let them die because I was weak.”

“There has to be another option.” Clarke insisted. “We can come up with something. Just hold off on the Reapers. Don’t use them. Stall for time.”

Lexa had to look away. “Any plan you come up with…I can’t know about it. You have to do it without me, otherwise I have an obligation to stop you. The less I know, the better chance you have at making it out of this alive.”

“We can’t get to the spaceplane without your code.” Clarke reminded her.

“I’ll share the code with all of my advisers. I’ll say that it’s in case Azgeda makes a preemptive move. But that’s the best I can do. Clarke, you have no idea how hard this is for me. If I help you, I’m dooming my people. If I don’t help you, I’m dooming yours. I never wanted to be responsible for that choice. All I ever wanted was to be on Earth. I never wanted this.”

Clarke knew better, but she couldn’t resist the urge. “Do you think that we could’ve worked? In another universe…if we’d met some other way…do you think there could’ve been a chance?”

Rather than answer, Lexa walked over to her bedside table and opened the top drawer. She pulled out the masquerade mask and ran her finger gently along its side. Without turning back to Clarke, she said, “That’s all I’ve thought about since the first moment I saw you in the garden.”

Before Clarke could vocalize a response, Lexa placed the mask over her face and whirled around to face Clarke. She walked right up to her and leaned in for the softest kiss that Clarke had ever experienced. Clarke hardly had enough time to process and close her eyes before Lexa was pulling back.

Lexa searched Clarke’s face for any sign that what she was doing was unwanted, but she found not even the slightest trace. It was Clarke who leaned in to continue the kiss, this time moving her hands to Lexa’s hips to pull the Commander even closer. Everything about kissing Lexa was incredible. From the softness of her lips, to the way she smelled like the flowers in Trikru’s garden, to the warmth that radiated from her body, to the eager way she took each kiss like it was a blessing.

 --

Clarke’s lips were still tingling by the time Lincoln snuck her back into the brig unnoticed. The group of Arkers were gathered around Raven, who sat in the middle of the cell with Lincoln’s communication device in her hand.

“Just in time.” Raven announced as she continued adjusting the settings. “We’ve secured the connection. Now we’re just waiting for the line get picked up clear.”

“Who are you trying to call?” Clarke asked as Lincoln locked the barred cell door behind her.

Before Raven could answer, a gargled voice sounded through the phone. With a big smile, Raven made the final adjustments until the clarity of the voice increased.

“Can you hear us now?” Raven asked.

“I can. I can hear you.” Abby’s voice was a relief to them all, but especially to Raven and Clarke. “Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.” Raven’s smile wavered as a bolt of pain shot through her leg causing her to gasp. Luckily for Raven’s pride, the reaction went unnoticed by Abby.

The good doctor wasted no time in asking the big questions. “Is everyone okay? Is everyone safe? How is Wells doing? The last we heard he was in critical condition but they wouldn’t specify what his injuries were.”

Kneeling down, Clarke replied, “Wells is alive but he’s in the medical bay and there isn’t room for visitors. A lot of people were injured on this side after the bridge explosion.” Clarke looked around at the others, silently asking them not to reveal that the situation was much worse than she was making it seem. “Mom, you have to tell us everything you know. Who set off the explosives?

“The explosives on the bridge? That was all Diana Sydney.” Abby revealed. “She wanted to incite a war, but she accidentally got herself and one of her people stuck in the explosion. She got herself blown up to start this fight, and now there’s a good chance she’ll get what she wanted. Thelonious is desperate to get Wells back, and I can’t exactly say that I’m unbiased now either. And Kane is under the impression that you’re all being held there against your will as hostages. Clarke, Raven, if you can get everyone back home, we might be able to put an end to this thing once and for all. I am confident that Thelonious will reconsider his position on the alliance if Wells is taken care of and you're all returned safely.”

“Mom…” Clarke sighed. “I don’t think Wells is going to make it that long.”

The call went silent for a few moments as Abby contemplated what to do next. “Are you safe?”

“Yes.” Clarke lied. “We’re safe for now, but there are people trying to talk the Commander into fighting back. They think the explosion on the bridge was a first strike. You have to get Chancellor Jaha to explain that it wasn’t a move approved by The Council, it was the act of a lone person with crazy ideals. The Commander is reasonable, but her people are afraid. They don’t want to sit by and wait for The Ark to find a way to attack Trikru. They don’t trust us anymore.”

“Find a way to get everyone home.” Abby repeated. “Nothing can be done until we know you kids are safe.”

Raven rolled her eyes. “We’re not kids.”

“You’re right.” Abby paused. “You’re right, you’re not kids. None of you are.”

The group looked around at each other as Abby spoke.

“You don’t get to be kids anymore. You have to be strong. And you’re going to need each other to make it through this. You do whatever it takes to come home, you hear me? Don’t worry about breaking laws or rules or what anyone else will think. You just get home safe. Okay? You do what you have to do. I mean that. Do whatever you have to do to get back home.”

“There’s a spaceplane.” Raven confessed. “If we can get to it, I can fly us back to The Ark.”

“Do it.” Abby urged. “Move as quickly as you can.”

Raven looked up at Clarke. “We need the Commander’s code.”

“We’ll have it soon.” Clarke replied with a glance to Lincoln. “She’s going to entrust the code with her advisers.”

Understanding that Lexa was aware of his treasonous actions, Lincoln gave a solemn nod. “I’ll open the airlock for you.”

“Clarke?” Abby called out.

“Yes?” Clarke held her breath.

"Losing your father...was the hardest thing I've ever gone through." She paused. "I can't do that again. Bring her home to me. Please."

Clarke locked eyes with Raven, who looked absolutely devastated to be hearing so much fear and pain in Abby’s voice. Clarke placed a hand on Raven’s shoulder and said to Abby, “In peace, may you leave this shore. In love, may you find the next. Safe passage on your travels, until our final journey to the ground. May we meet again”

A few moments passed before Abby’s trembling voice whispered back through the phone, “May we meet again.”


	6. The Choices

“Clarke. Clarke, wake up. Clarke. _Clarke_. Wake. Up.”

Dragged into cold harsh reality from the comfort of sleep, Clarke pried her eyelids apart in search for the whispers that had woken her. Through the discomfort of her stiff neck, she turned her head toward the barred cell door. She had been expecting to see a guard, or perhaps a rescue team sent by The Ark, or maybe even the Commander, but the person who was staring at her through the bars was none of those. With his furrowed brow and his relentless frown, Lincoln motioned for Clarke to quietly leave through the door he was unlocking.

Clarke waited until the two of them had exited the brig undetected to ask, “What’s going on?”

“I’m taking you to the medical bay.” He revealed, already leading her through the station. Trikru’s halls were eerily empty in the late hours of the night, but the silence only increased Clarke’s fear of getting caught.

“Are you taking me to see Wells?” She asked as they passed through a doorway and began to climb a long and narrow stairwell.

“Yes. It’s dangerous to take you this far away from the brig, but you have to go now.” Lincoln stopped at the top of the stairs and waited for the still bruised and sore Clarke to catch up. “Your friend won’t make it through the night.”

Clarke was out of breath by the time she reached the landing, but she was thankful that her heaving chest effectively excused her from having to come up with a reply. Lincoln continued on through another door and down a few more confusingly similar hallways. Clarke quickly found that trying to keep up with his fast pace and his light footsteps only made her more of liability. She forced herself to slow down and take it easy. She was still hurting from having been tossed around the Commander's office after the bridge explosion, and on top of that her nerves were acting like a buzzing electricity that coursed throughout her body and made walking slow an excruciating process. Each echo from her heavy boots hitting the floor felt like a slap to her anxiety. 

Finally, after an eternity of feeling like she could be discovered at any moment, Clarke reached Lincoln outside of the medical bay doors. He opened them for her, but did follow after her when she walked through. The inside of the medical bay was incredibly different from the medical wing on The Ark, but in so many ways it was just the same. The smell of sterilized utensils, the beeping of heart monitors, the design of the beds, the peacefully resting patients, all of it reminded Clarke of The Ark. Of her mother. Of everything she might never see again.

Movement from behind a privacy curtain at the end of the rectangular room frightened Clarke to the point that she couldn’t bear to move a muscle. Frozen in place, she waited with her breath held. A hand slipped through the curtain and pulled it back far enough for a familiar face to peek through.

“Lexa?” Clarke took a hesitant step forward.

Lexa pulled the curtain back further so that Clarke could see Wells on the bed beside her. Gravely, she said, “You must hurry. He doesn’t have long now.”

Abandoning all worry for her aching body, Clarke hobbled across the room and through the parted curtains. Instinctively, she placed her hand over Wells’s forehead to check his temperature. 

“He’s burning up.” She muttered before glancing back at Lexa. The Commander stood at the foot of the bed with her head hanging low and regret in her eyes. “Can he hear us?”

Weakly, almost incoherently, Wells whispered, “He can.”

His eyes fluttered open, the whites of which were streaked with bright red veins. He coughed a few times, causing his entire body to shake.

“Wells…” Clarke didn’t know where to begin, but standing there and seeing the boy she’d grown up with literally lying on his death bed was the final crack in the wall she’d built up around herself. Every repressed feeling of grief, every bittersweet childhood memory, every stifled ounce of agony came pouring out of her. She felt the weight of her overbearing pride, the weight of Finn’s death, the weight of the wasted days she could’ve spent repairing her friendship with Wells, the weight of humanity’s future, the weight of her own past.

Tears streamed freely down her face as she held her best friend’s hand and said to him, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was wrong to turn my back on you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this…it’s that not all of choices we make are easy. I spent a lot of time in lockup hating you for what you did. But I was wrong. You were just doing what you thought was right. You were just trying to protect our people when you told your father that mine was planning to go public about the falling oxygen levels. You were making a tough decision. I couldn’t see that at the time, but I do now. And I forgive you. I do. I forgive you.”

Losing the energy to keep his eyes open, Wells swallowed hard and replied, “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

“What mistake?” Clarke leaned in even closer so that she wouldn’t miss a word.

He shuddered and answered, “Don’t expect my dad to do the right thing. He thinks like a Chancellor, not like a person.”

“He’s been asking for you.” Clarke purposefully used the information to redirect the conversation. She didn’t want Wells revealing more than he should with the Commander just a few feet away. “He’s threatening to go to war for you.”

“Stop him.” Wells fell into another coughing fit, this time speckling drops of blood across the front of his white medical gown. He inhaled a long, wheezy breath before adding, “Please. Do what I couldn’t.”

Clarke started to tell him that the only guaranteed way to stop Chancellor Jaha from loading up some secret nuclear missile and launching it right at Trikru was for Wells to return to The Ark, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell a boy who wanted peace that his death would be a catalyst for war. She couldn’t tell her friend that his father was going to murder hundreds of people in his name. But mostly, she didn’t have the time to say it. She didn't have the time to say anything at all.

Before Clarke could get a word out, the heart monitor above the bed flatlined. And just like that, Wells was gone.

“There isn’t much time.” Lexa said from where she stood near the end of bed. Clarke turned to face her, noting how the dim lighting left the Commander half hidden in the shadows. “If you’re going to take the cargo plane, you need to do it now.”

“Did you send for me?” Clarke asked as she used the sleeves of her shirt to dry  tears from her face. “Did you order Lincoln to bring me here?”

“Yes.” She watched Clarke closely. “I couldn’t…I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I took away your last chance to say goodbye.”

“Thank you for letting me see him.” Clarke sniffled and took in a deep breath to calm herself. Standing beside Wells’s dead body was incredibly hard, but the worst part was over now. She glanced down at him and felt some relief to see him resting peacefully and no longer in pain. Yes, the worst of it was over.

“I should’ve let you see him sooner.” The regret was clear in Lexa's tone.

“The past doesn’t matter now.” Clarke pulled back the curtains ever so slightly to the check that they were still alone. Only beds filled with sleeping patients stared back at her. “What’s the plan after this? You release your prisoners, send us back to The Ark…to what? Wait for your Reapers to show up?”

Lexa folded her arms behind her back. “I’ve tried to convince my advisers and the Azgedian descendants that the Reapers should be held as a defensive measure, but they fear your leaders will use their nuclear missile to eliminate us completely. And after you return to The Ark…I’m afraid nothing will stop your Council from using it. At this point, it seems as though the Reapers can only be useful as an offensive maneuver. They're the only thing I have to protect my people from yours, Clarke.”

“Don’t give up on peace.” Clarke urged her. “I still believe that it’s possible. If we go back to The Ark, we can tell them how merciful you were. How you went against your advisers and helped us leave Trikru as soon as you found out the explosion wasn’t an attack sanctioned by The Council.”

Lexa couldn’t meet Clarke’s eyes. “It doesn’t matter now who blew up the bridge. The only thing that matters is whether or not I make the right choice.”

“There is no right choice. Right and wrong, good and bad, they don’t exist.” Clarke gestured to Wells. “In the end, he knew that. And now…so do I.”

“The right choice is whatever will keep my people alive and out of a civil war.” Lexa explained.

Clarke was quiet for a few moments as she thought about how precarious their situation was. No matter which move either of them made, people were going to die. Knowing that the outcome would likely be grim regardless of the choices made, knowing that one or both of them would be killed before the end of it, and knowing that she only had one move left to make, Clarke thought of a plan that would change everything.

“Do you have another spaceplane?” Clarke asked quickly.

Lexa shook her head. “No. We have two escape pods, but they’re for ejection only. Once they leave the station, they’re gone. We can’t bring them back to Trikru.”

“Is that what the Reapers would use to get to The Ark?” Clarke wondered. “Do you think one could travel even farther than that?”

Suspicious, Lexa said, “I suppose. Why?”

Clarke didn’t miss a beat. “Because I want to take one to the ground."

“To the ground?” Lexa raised a skeptical brow.

“It's the only way to find out if Earth is actually inhabitable or not.” Clarke shrugged. “And if we’re all going to die in some inevitable space war, I might as well try.”

“You’ll die.” Lexa balked. “Your people said the Earth had too much radiation.”

“My people say a lot of things.” Clarke replied. “And so do yours. Doesn’t mean they're always right."

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“It’s a suicide mission.”

“Probably.”

Lexa grew angry. “After everything I’ve done to keep you alive…I can’t believe you want to just throw it all away. You can go home, Clarke. You can be with your mother. You can live.”

“You know that’s not true.” Clarke wasn’t afraid to reveal her own anger as well. “You know damn well that the only place we can find peace now is on the ground.”

“Not if you die the second you take off your helmet.” Lexa took a cautious step forward.

“This is better for everyone.” Clarke paused. “I can’t stay in the middle anymore. You’re giving me the cargo plane and asking me to pick a side…but I can’t do it. I can’t go back to The Ark and I can’t stay here. I refuse to take part in this war.”

Clarke could see the shift in Lexa’s stance as she realized there was no fighting her on this one.

“So you want my cargo plane, and you want one of my escape pods.” Lexa feigned professionalism, but the cracks in her façade were of cavernous proportions. “Is that right?”

“Yes.” Clarke all but dared her to ask for something in return.

“Okay.” The sadness in Lexa’s eyes stabbed at Clarke’s heart like a knife. “Just be sure to take down a radio with you.”

Clarke was more than little surprised at how easily the Commander had caved.

“This isn’t me giving up.” Clarke said to her. “This is the third option we were looking for. This is the way out, the way to peace…and I can’t ask anyone to go down there for me. I have to do it myself."

“I know.” Lexa’s voice fell to just above a whisper. She looked at Clarke with admiration and awe. “You’re the leader I wish I could be.”

“Don’t say that. Your people need you here, Lexa. You’re the glue that’s holding this ship together. Trikru needs you to keep the dark days from happening again. They need someone compassionate. Someone strong enough to stand up for what she believes in. Someone who believes in peace. You’re the leader they need.”

Lexa’s bottom lip trembled as she fought back against the tears that threatened to fall. “If I was really strong enough to stand up for what I believe in, we wouldn’t be in this position at all.”

“Don’t say that like you have a choice.” Clarke felt the urge to reach out and comfort her, but knew that she couldn’t. “You fought for peace. We both did.”

“I don’t know what else I can do.” Lexa confessed. “Unless I go down to the frozen storage unit and destroy all of the Reaper serum myself.”

“Why can’t you do that?” Clarke questioned.

“They’ll kill me for it.” She answered. “Then the Azgedians will take power. Then they’ll throw all of my advisers into the brig to rot. Then they’ll go after The Ark anyway. Either way, Trikru only survives if we strike first. For the sake of my people, I have to be the one who gives that order. Your people don't have to go back to The Ark if they'd rather stay here...but right now I honestly don't know which side is safer to be on. They may as well be with their loved ones while we all wait to see."

Clarke wanted to scream. She wanted to cry and beat her fists against the wall until the pain in her hands overshadowed the agony in her chest. But she couldn't. She didn't have the time, nor the energy, nor the patience. Her breakdown would have to be postponed until after humanity had been saved.

“I need to get moving.” Clarke finally said after a long silence.

With a nod, Lexa pulled back the privacy curtains and allowed for Clarke to pass.

“I wish things were different.” Lexa said as Clarke began to walk toward the medical bay doors.

“Yeah.” Clarke took one final glance back at her and at Wells’s body on the bed behind her. “So do I.”

As Clarke reached the exit, she heard Lexa call out one final thing to her.

“May we meet again.”

\--

“Can it fly?” Clarke asked as she pulled on a stolen Trikru spacesuit one leg at a time. It was old and smelled like it’d been sitting in the storage bin where she'd found it for the last century untouched. It even still had a small national flag stitched onto it, one that she recognized from Unity Day celebrations and from her history class.

“I don’t know about that.” From inside the cockpit, Raven pressed a few seemingly random buttons and listened intently to the following sounds the escape pod made. “But it’ll definitely float in whatever direction we send it.”

“How reassuring.” Clarke sighed. She shoved her arms through the sleeves and picked up the bulky helmet from where she’d set it on the ground beside her boots. Tossing the helmet up into the pod’s copilot seat, she took one final walk around the outside of it until she reached the pilot's side.

“So we’re taking this bad boy with us?” Raven asked after struggling to hop down from the cockpit on her own. Wincing and rubbing her knee she added, “It’s a piece of junk, but it’ll get us to The Ark intact. I’ll have to stay in the cargo spaceplane though. That one definitely needs a pilot who actually knows what they’re doing.”

“Could I fly this one? Or, I guess, float this one?” Clarke climbed up to the pilot's seat and looked back down at Raven. “What would I need to do?”

Raven wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand before she pointed to the console. “See how I’ve got everything set up? All you’d have to do after closing the door is just hit that switch in the top left, the one next to the screen that shows you your oxygen levels. That’ll detach you from the airlock. After you’re loose, you just set the coordinates you want and use your thrusters to direct yourself back to The Ark. You’ll only have enough power to propel yourself into motion, so make sure you get it right. This is some old school tech in here so you’ll have to be careful about what you touch.”

Looking around at the flashing lights and numerous controls, Clarke asked, “And what would I need to do if I missed The Ark and started heading straight for Earth?”

Raven pointed to a monitor above the windshield. “The computer system on board would guide you through any kind of atmospheric reentry. That’s what these things were made for. But I wouldn’t be worried about missing The Ark. I’m more worried about you being able to properly dock this thing onto one of The Ark’s airlocks. The computer should be able to guide you through that process too, but it might take a few tries before you get it right.”

“Okay.” Clarke let out a shaky, nervous breath. “I guess I’m ready then.”

“How’re we dividing up who goes on the cargo plane and who goes in the pod with you?” Raven paused. “Also, how are you planning to pry Octavia off of that Lincoln guy? Bellamy still doesn’t want to leave without her.”

“You’ll figure it out. I have faith in you.” Clarke replied. Just as Raven started to ask Clarke what she meant by that, Clarke hit a button to securely close the door to the cockpit between them. It slammed shut with a loud bang.

Through the glass window on the door, a bewildered and pale Raven asked, “What are you doing?"

Clarke couldn't put it off any longer. “I'm not going back to The Ark with you. I'm going to the ground. I’m going to see if it’s inhabitable.”

“But…” Raven’s face fell. “The radiation. It’ll kill you.”

“Maybe.” Clarke allowed. “Or maybe it won’t. There’s only one way to find out for sure. If I can survive on the ground, I can stop this war. It might be our only chance at peace.”

“You’re going to die!” Raven slammed the side of her fist against the window. “You can’t give up like this, Clarke. You can’t just leave us.”

“I wish I had the time to explain everything to you but I don’t.” Clarke picked up the helmet and set it in her lap. She looked back to Raven. “Just know that I have to do this. I can’t go back to The Ark, and I can't stay here. I can't stick around and wait for one group to destroy the other. We’ve got one last shot at peace, and this is it.” She hesitated. “You have to get everyone on the spaceplane. Do whatever you have to do, just get everyone back to The Ark. Let them be with their families and their loved ones again before it's too late.”

Raven hit her fist against the escape pod a few more futile times before her anger fell into despair.

“Don’t do this to me.” She cried. “Finn…Wells…now you too?” She had to look away. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“You can take it.” Clarke assured her. “I believe that you can.”

“What about Abby?” Raven asked. "What about her, Clarke?"

It made Clarke's heart ache to know that her probable death would hurt Abby, but she at least knew that someone would be there to look after the doctor.

“I know you’ll take care of her for me.” Clarke said. "I know you'll be there for her."

Raven pushed herself away from the escape pod and stifled her need to scream. Gaining back some composure, she returned to the window and said, “This plan is stupid.”

There was no point in denying it. “I know.”

After a long sigh and a lot of inner turmoil, Raven told her, “Make sure you pay attention to the computer’s messages on the top monitor. The atmospheric drag and the aerodynamic heating will try to break apart the entire pod upon reentry, and that’s going to put a lot of stress on it. If something goes wrong, you’ll have to act fast.”

“Thank you.” Clarke placed her palm flat against the window and waited. Slowly, begrudgingly, Raven placed her hand in the same spot on the other side.

“Bring us home.” Raven said. “Bring us back to the ground.”

A smile pulled at the corners of Clarke’s lips as oncoming tears brimmed her eyes. She nodded and said, “I’ll meet you there.”


	7. Going Home

If someone had asked Clarke back when she was being released from lockup what she thought she’d be doing in a week’s time, plummeting toward the Earth in a stolen escape pod from a foreign political power would not have been one of her guesses. Not even close. And yet, there she was. Sitting in the pilot’s seat of a hundred year old escape pod that was entering the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speed.

“Okay. You’re okay. You’re okay. Everything is okay.” Clarke spoke aloud to herself as the pod began to shake violently, causing her to bounce and lurch against the restraint belts in her seat. Bright flames obstructed her view through the windshield and hurt her eyes even through the protective visor of her Trikru helmet. She could feel herself sweating within the suit itself, which had become swelteringly hot from the heat of reentry and from her own panicked reaction to being strapped into a pod that was literally falling out of the sky.

The computer above her flashed to catch her attention, alerting her that the coordinates she’d set were still a feasible landing point. Letting out a short breath of relief, she held onto the restraints across her chest and waited for the end of her final journey to the ground.

Luckily, landing was the easiest part of the entire process. A parachute shot out automatically from the pod’s backside, and the computer effortlessly used the wind to guide the vehicle in the right direction. Through the scorched windshield, Clarke watched with wide eyes as Earth popped up around her. The pod came in hot and fast, but the landing gears absorbed the momentum without trouble.

With trembling hands, she released herself from the belt restraints and reached for her radio. She held it in her lap and stared out the blackened windshield, wondering if these were her final moments alive.

“Don’t be scared.” Clarke said aloud to herself. “You can do this. Everything will be fine. You fell from space and you’re fine. Just open the door…you’ll still be fine.”

In a hurried motion, Clarke hit the button to open the pilot’s side door that Raven had been standing on the other side of a mere twenty minutes ago. Heaving her legs over the side and out the door, Clarke hopped down to ground and fell flat on her back. Earth’s gravity, as it turned out, was a bit stronger than what she’d gotten used to on Trikru. That, and the fact that her shaky legs had yet to calm, left her on the grass with no hope of getting up anytime soon.

Without allowing herself the time to overthink it, Clarke reached up and unlatched the helmet from her suit. Holding her breath, she pulled the helmet off and set it beside her on the grass. She waited, perfectly still with her lungs burning, for something to happen.

But nothing ever did. Her skin didn’t burn, her eyes didn’t pop out of her skull, her muscles didn’t convulse uncontrollably. If there was still too much radiation for her to survive normally, the myths of its effects on the human body seemed to have been dramatically exaggerated on The Ark.

After releasing her held breath in a sigh of relief and sucking in fresh air, Clarke was overloaded with smells. The grass, the dirt, the sizzling escape pod beside her, the air itself. Everything smelled so organic, so natural. So right. She could feel the wind on her face and see it rustling the leaves of the trees around her. The sun had just begun to rise, yet to even make an appearance over the treetops, but the sky was already a beautiful mixture of pinks, purples, and oranges. Clarke waited until long after the stars had disappeared and been replaced by a bright blue sky before she tried to move.

As the technology onboard the pod finally whirred down, Clarke could hear the birds and the wildlife of the forest. The sound of rushing water in a nearby creek, however, was the noise that stirred Clarke into action. With her dry throat begging for her to drink something, Clarke unzipped the spacesuit and crawled out from under the weight of the heavy fabric. Fighting gravity on wobbly legs, Clarke pushed herself up so that she was standing.

“Okay.” She sighed, wiped the sweat from her brow, grabbed the radio from where it sat on the grass beside the discarded suit, and headed for the creek. Walking on Earth proved to be much harder than walking on The Ark or on Trikru. It wasn’t the gravity that kept tripping her up, but the uneven terrain of thick plants, the winding roots, and the random scattering of rocks and twigs. She wasn’t used to having things crunch beneath her boots, nor was she used to looking down as she moved to ensure that she would not misstep or lose her footing. It was a new world for her, and it would take some time to adjust, but she was far from complaining.

Stopping at the water’s edge, Clarke placed the radio on a flat rock and carefully kneeled down in mud. Using her cupped hands, she brought the cold water up to her mouth and drank without care. She repeated the motion a few more times before she sat back on the flat rock and dried her hands on her shirt.

“Oh. Woah.” Clarke muttered as she noticed a trail of ants filing one after the other across the rock. She spotted a stray ant wandering around the top of the radio, so she placed her finger in its path and allowed it to climb on top of her hand. She watched it for several moments before she gently placed the ant near the rest of its kind.

It was the first real-life nonhuman creature that Clarke had ever seen before, and it was beautiful.

Taking the bulky two-way radio into her lap, she played with the dials and buttons until she found the signal she wanted.

“Hello?” Clarke cleared her throat and tried again. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

A beat passed before a voice covered in static spoke back to her.

“Identify yourself.”

“Clarke Griffin.”

The radio went silent for a few moments before a new voice took over.

“Clarke? Is that you?”

Clarke’s eyes watered at the sound of her mother’s voice. “Mom, it’s me.”

Abby wasted no time. “Where are you? Are you safe? Are you on the cargo plane? Our system can’t pinpoint your location. There’s something blocking you out.”

Clarke looked around herself at the forest’s abundance of green and brown colors.

“I’m on Earth.” She said.

A long pause.

“You’re where?” Abby asked.

“Earth, Mom.” Clarke sniffled. “I’m on Earth.”

Another long pause came, followed by a third voice coming through the radio.

“Clarke, this is Chancellor Marcus Kane speaking. We need to know your location, over.”

“Chancellor?” Clarke questioned.

“Thelonious was declared unfit for duty. Please, Clarke, tell us where you are.” Kane answered.

“I’m on Earth.” She checked her surroundings again, a new paranoid habit of hers. “I stole a Trikru escape pod and I came down to the ground to see if Earth is inhabitable. I’ve been outside for a few minutes now. I’m doing okay, I think. No noticeable signs of radiation at all. I should be somewhere near Mount Weather. It’s the only place I could think of to try and land near.” As an afterthought she added, “Over.”

“Are you alone?” Kane asked.

“Yes. I came by myself. The others were planning to take a cargo spaceplane to The Ark, but now that we know the Earth is inhabitable they might not need to take that risk. I need to tell the Commander that the Earth is safe. This entire war can be avoided now. Over.”

“Let’s hope it will be that simple.” Kane replied before falling into an essay’s worth of procedural information that Clarke only partially listened to.

“Yes, I understand.” Clarke said at the end of his speech. “How long do you think it will take for the separate Ark stations to detach and begin reentry?”

“We’ll have to wait and observe your health for a full twenty-four hours before we can begin preparing for reentry.” He answered grimly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to survive on your own for now, but if the radiation is truly survivable without any apparent risks…I’m being told it should take approximately thirty-eight hours for us to join you after Medical has given the go ahead. Over.”

Thirty-eight hours? Clarke’s heart sank. So much could go wrong in that time. For all Clarke knew, Reapers could be headed for The Ark as they spoke.

“I can handle it. I can survive on my own for now.” She did her best to sound stronger than she felt. “But I need to speak with the Commander now. She’s waiting to hear from me. If I tell her the ground is safe, it could buy everyone the time we need to get both Trikru and The Ark on Earth. Over.”

“Keep close to your radio. We’ll need to check-in with you at the turn of every hour. Over.” He instructed.

“Roger that.” Clarke replied.

“Clarke?” It was Abby this time. “Stay safe. I’ll talk to you again in forty-five minutes. Don’t wander too much. Stay near the escape pod. Make note of any significant changes to how you feel. I love you.”

“I love you too.” Clarke looked up at the morning sky, still so bright and blue above her. “You’re going to love it here. It’s so beautiful on the ground.”

“I’ll see it soon. And you.” She said. “Over and out.”

Clarke nodded to herself and repeated, “Over and out.”

After taking a few moments to breathe, stretch her legs, and grab another sip of water from the creek, she returned to the flat rock and began messing with the radio’s dials and buttons. Understandably, it took her much longer to find Trikru than had taken her to find The Ark.

“Clarke Griffin? Are you out there?”

Startled by the sudden voice popping out of the radio, Clarke fumbled with the transmitter until she could bring it up to her mouth and say, “Yes, Clarke Griffin. That’s me. Who is this?”

Silence.

She waited and waited for the speaker to return, but much like it had been with The Ark, it was a different voice that spoke through the radio the second time around.

“Clarke? Is it really you?”

A smile pulled at the corners of her lips. Even with an annoying amount of radio static covering it up, Lexa’s voice a beautiful sound to hear.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Clarke answered, her smile still in place. “I’m on Earth. I did it. I’m here. And it’s inhabitable. Or, at least, it seems to be safe for now. I haven’t noticed anything harmful yet.”

“You’re safe?” She asked in disbelief. “We can come home?”

“You need to wait at least a full day to make sure that the radiation isn’t just killing me slowly. After a full twenty-four hours of observation and an added thirty-eight hour period of breaking apart stations and sending them to the ground individually, The Ark will be down here too.”

“I can’t wait that long, Clarke.” Lexa replied. “It’s only a matter of time before the Azgedians discover what I’ve done.”

Clarke paused. “What did you do?”

“I disposed of the Reaper serum.” She answered, her voice almost entirely garbled by interference. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to. I went down to the frozen storage unit and I destroyed every last drop of that vile liquid.”

Clarke felt herself smiling again. The day just kept getting better and better. “I’m proud of you. It was the right thing to do.”

“I know.” She sighed. “But if the Azgedians or their would-be Reapers find out…it’ll be the end of me.”

“No, it won’t be. You’re stronger than they are. You have supporters on Trikru and on The Ark. Jaha isn’t Chancellor anymore; Marcus Kane is in charge now. I think he’s on our side. Well, he _wants_ to be on our side. My mom trusts him so I’m inclined to trust him too. You’ll be safer on the ground. The Azgedians can leave and go live by themselves somewhere far away from us. There’s plenty of space down here, trust me.”

“I’m the one who’s in space.” She replied.

Clarke laughed out loud. “Of all the jokes in the world, that’s the one you choose to make? That’s terrible.”

"I'd like to see you do better."

Clarke smirked. "Come down here and I'll show you."

“Stop.” She pleaded, her tone growing a touch more serious. “I can’t handle you being charming when you’re so far away.”

“You started it.” Clarke reminded her.

“I know.” She said. “I do seem to have a bad habit of starting things with you that I can’t finish.”

“You can finish this.” Clarke promised. “You can bring your people home, to the ground. To me.”

“You said twenty-four hours, right?” Lexa asked, her tone changing once more.

“Yeah. You need to wait for me to pass a twenty-four hour observation period. It's just a precaution. Why?” 

She groaned. “I’ve just been informed that an airlock is missing my cargo plane and its headed straight for you.”

Clarke jumped up to her feet, used her hand to block the sun from her eyes, and searched the sky above her. Running awkwardly back to the escape pod with her radio in hand, Clarke brought the transmitter up to her mouth and asked, “Why are they coming down to Earth? I told Raven to go to The Ark.”

Rather than answer Clarke’s question, Lexa mumbled back, “I have to go. Roan and Ontari are aware that your friends have escaped. It won't be long now before they realize the Reaper serum is missing, too. I’ll address everyone as soon as I can and inform them that the ground is inhabitable. I’ll try to radio you again later if it’s safe. Take care of yourself, Clarke. Please.”

“I will.” Clarke wasn’t sure if Lexa heard her, but she didn’t have much time to think about it. Directly above her, a small speeding object was falling out of the sky.

Clarke blocked out the sun with her hand again and watched as the large cargo spaceplane came into view.

“No. You’re too high.” Clarke began wildly jumping and swinging her arms around to catch their attention. “You’re too high! I’m down here! I’m right here!”

Despite her best efforts, the plane overshot Clarke’s landing point and descended somewhere in the distance. Securing the radio against herself, Clarke took off at maximum speed through the forest.

\--

When Clarke emerged from the woods, she was astonished at how magnificent the door built into the mountain’s edge was. The door led to Mount Weather, a solid fortress built deep underground that was meant to withstand nuclear fallout. If anyone on their side of the Earth was still alive, Mount Weather was likely the place to find them. 

Voices drifting toward her on the wind caught Clarke’s attention and drew her toward a clearing not far from the Mount Weather entrance. As she hiked closer, the arguing Arkers appeared between the trees. 

Stepping out of the shadows, Clarke asked the group, “Miss me?”

Raven, Murphy, Bellamy, Jasper, Monty, Miller, Octavia, and a very angry Lincoln all turned to face her. They stood silent for a moment before the yelling continued, this time with everyone directing their heated words at Clarke.

“Woah!” Clarke threw up her hands in mock surrender. “What is all the fighting about? Hey! Shut up!” She waited until each of them fell silent. “What is the matter with all of you? We’re on Earth! You should be happy we’re not all dead right now. The ground is inhabitable! This is a good thing.”

Bellamy scoffed. “Yeah, well, not all of us wanted to find that out. Some of us wanted to go home.”

Octavia glared at her brother. “The Ark is no home of mine.”

“Yes, it is.” He insisted. "It's _our_ home."

Lincoln’s hands balled into threatening fists as he said to Bellamy, “Octavia doesn’t need to you to speak for her. She knows how she feels.”

Bellamy reached for the electric baton on his belt but found only the empty space where it should’ve been. Scowling, he fired back, “You don’t even know her. I’m her family.”

“Stop arguing!” Octavia shouted at them both.

Walking in circles and staring widely at the new world around him, Jasper asked the group, “When is The Ark coming down?”

Monty answered, “They won’t be able to land this close to the mountain. They’ll have to go somewhere with level ground. It could be _days_ before we see our families again.”

“Oh, shut up.” Murphy groaned and rolled his eyes. “If you can survive lockup, you can survive being the only humans on an entire planet for a few days. Quit acting like a bunch of babies.”

“Murphy’s right.” Clarke agreed. “We’re alone down here. We have to stick together until everyone else can join us.”

To no one in particular, Miller asked, "Is the gravity different down here? I feel heavier."

"You're not the only one. It's definitely different." Monty confirmed.

Noticing how quiet Raven was, Clarke asked her, “Is everything okay?”

Raven slumped down to the grass and cradled her knee close to her chest. With gritted teeth, she said, “I think I’m losing my leg. It needs medical attention, but the closest doctor is kind of orbiting the planet right now."

The group settled as reality finally sunk in.

Clarke kneeled down beside Raven in the grass and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “My mom and the others will be here in a few days. They’ll be able to help you.”

“Days? Oh, yeah, that’s fine.” Raven laughed darkly. “I can hardly move it at all, but that’s cool. They can just take their sweet time.”

“Let’s get you in the shade.” Clarke suggested. “There’s a creek back where I landed in the escape pod. It has fresh water. I'll have to go get some and bring it here so that you can stay hydrated."

“Don’t talk like that.” Raven pleaded seriously. “You sound too much like Abby when you go all Doctor Clarke on me.”

Clarke shrugged. “Well, for the next few days, you’ll just have to get used to it. I’m not just going to sit around and let you suffer. I’m going to do everything I can to help you. You got that?”

Raven let out an exasperated sigh, followed by a sarcastic, “Yes, ma’am.”

Clarke stood up and looked around at the group.

“Why did you come down to the ground when you didn’t even know it was safe yet?” She finally asked.

Murphy folded his arms over his chest and answered, “You’ll have to ask the pilot that one.”

Clarke looked down at Raven expectantly.

Raven leaned backwards until her back was flat against the grass. She stared up at the clear sky and said, “I couldn’t let you do this alone. Finn and Wells, they wouldn’t have let you do this alone either. And this way…” She gestured to the idle cargo plane across the clearing. “We have an exit strategy if the radiation starts to make us sick. I can still fly that up to The Ark if I have to. Won't need my leg for it."

“Then let’s go.” Bellamy grumbled. “I don’t want to wait around here for my skin to fall off. Let's go up to The Ark."

“I’m not leaving.” Raven replied. “You can go sit in the plane if you want, but it's not going anywhere. I'm serious. If you want to keep whining, go do it by yourself in the plane. No one’s stopping you.”

“I can’t just leave Octavia out here. I have to protect her. She’s my sister!” He yelled, startling a pair of birds from of nearby tree.

Everyone watched with utmost interest as the birds flapped their wings, rode the wind, and danced together in the air above them.

Octavia smiled. “We’re on Earth.”

Lincoln nodded and took her hand in his to hold. Quietly, he said, “We’re home.”


	8. The Mountain

“This feels wrong. I don’t think we should be doing this. We should go back and wait with the others until everyone else from The Ark gets here too.” Jasper’s nervous words carried throughout the mine tunnel with ease, echoing deep into the dark unknown ahead of them.

The light from outside the entrance was starting to dim, causing everyone to ready their Trikru flashlights that Lincoln had so kindly smuggled onto the cargo plane before their escape. Though the broody Commander’s adviser had thought ahead and packed many useful supplies to bring with them, he had not anticipated that their journey would’ve ended with them on the ground rather than on The Ark. They were left without food and proper shelter, both of which were vital to their survival. The group had been forced to sleep inside the cargo plane with all of them huddled together for warmth during their long first night on Earth. They could live without proper nutrition while The Ark and Trikru prepped to join them on the ground, but none of them particularly wanted to spend another night shivering on the hard floor.

“Be quiet!” Bellamy hissed back at Jasper. When he turned to face forward again, he abruptly stopped in his tracks to avoid running face first into Clarke. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited for Jasper, Octavia, Lincoln, and Monty to catch up to them.

Once they were all gathered before her, she pointed in the direction from which they’d entered and said, “The exit is that way. Whoever wants to go back to camp and wait with Raven, Murphy, and Miller needs to go now before it’s too late. This is your last chance to turn around on your own, so you’d better take it if you can’t handle this.”

Jasper raised his hand into the air, as if he were sitting in one of their school classes back on The Ark instead of standing in an underground mine tunnel that they’d happened to stumble upon the previous day while foraging for food.

“Can I just say…” He let out a shaky breath. “This is the dumbest plan in the history of dumb plans. I mean, what makes you so sure that there’s actually a secret backdoor to Mount Weather just hanging out down here? And what makes you think that we can even open that secret backdoor? Last time I checked, we don’t exactly have any keys or explosives on us. And there could be dozens of tunnels in this mountain. We could get lost down here. There could be something _living_ in here! I’ve never met a bear before, but I don’t really want to see one anytime soon if I can help it.”

Bellamy looked sickened by Jasper’s cowardice. “Just go back to camp and wait with the others. We can do this without you.”

Jasper shrunk into himself. “I can’t go back alone. What if I get lost in the woods? What if something attacks me out there while I’m on my own? I’m not a very fast runner.”

Lincoln used the sharpened spear in his hand to nudge the back of Jasper’s left leg, causing the frightened teen to jump. With his usual serious tone, Lincoln said to him, “You need to learn how to defend yourself. There are many dangers in this world, and we won’t always be here to protect you from them.”

“Lincoln’s right.” Bellamy agreed, earning a look of surprise from his sister. “You can’t rely on other people to save you. You have to learn how to control your fears. How to fight for survival.”

Monty placed a hand on Jasper’s shoulder and pulled him back from the circle. To the others he said, “I’ve got this. Let me talk to him alone for a minute.”

While the two best friends moved aside to have their private conversation, Clarke directed her attention to the remaining four members of their tunnel exploration team.

“We need to move quickly once we’re in the dark.” Clarke reminded them. “The charges on these flashlights won’t last for very long. We’ll need them to find our way back out.”

“We should split up.” Lincoln suggested. “These tunnels will begin to branch out. Splitting up can save us time and energy.”

Octavia raised a hand to silence Bellamy before he could even begin to voice is disapproval for Lincoln’s plan.

“It’s good idea.” The younger Blake agreed. “We can go in pairs. Me and Lincoln, Jasper and Monty, and the two of you.”

Bellamy shook his head. “Absolutely not. There is no way in hell that I’m letting you out of my sight.”

Clarke didn’t have the patience for their bickering. “Hey! We don’t have time for this. Your sister will be fine with Lincoln. We can trust him.”

“Why should we trust him?” Bellamy asked, struggling to keep his voice low. “We don’t even know him. He’s not one of us.”

“The Commander trusts Lincoln, and I trust the Commander.” Clarke answered simply.

“And what makes the mighty Commander so trustworthy?” Bellamy questioned.

“Lexa has done more to keep us alive than you ever have.” Clarke snapped.

Bellamy scoffed. “She locked us up. She got your friends killed. She almost started a _war_ because she didn’t want to give up her power. There is no reason to believe that she’s got our best interests at heart. What do we even know about her? She could be a maniacal inbred psychopath for all we know.”

If it hadn’t been for Octavia standing in the way, Lincoln might’ve sent a few punches flying Bellamy’s way. Hell, even Clarke felt like taking a few swings at him too.

Rather than attack, Lincoln threateningly pointed his spear at Bellamy over Octavia’s shoulder and said, “Never speak of Heda in that way again.”

“Why?” Bellamy used the end of his own sharpened weapon to push Lincoln’s away from his face. “What are you going to do? Lock me up? Kill me?”

“Can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind.” Lincoln growled.

Bellamy turned to Clarke. “Why do you insist on working with these people? This one’s ready to throw a spear into my back, the ones on Trikru hate us, and the Commander hasn’t done a damn thing to help us.”

“Let me tell you a secret.” Clarke said as she forced a smile and beckoned with her finger for Bellamy to lean down closer to her. Cautiously, he obliged and waited for her to speak. With one swift swing, Clarke bopped Bellamy over the head with the end of her flashlight. The blow was hard enough to send Bellamy stumbling backward until he fell flat on his back in the dirt.

“What the hell?” He shouted up at her, his words echoing loudly in the tunnel as he held a hand over the growing bump on his head. The others stared at her in awe, with the exception of Lincoln. For perhaps the first time ever, she had earned a pleased grin from the man.

“Alright. Listen up.” Clarke took a deep breath in. “Here’s how this is going to work. We’re going to stop all of this whining and arguing. We can’t have any more hostility. We don’t have time to waste. If we want to get inside this mountain before nightfall, we have to actually get some work done. There are warm beds in there. Supplies. Tools. Technology. Real weapons. Hydroelectric power! If we can get Raven and Monty into that control room, we could have this whole place up and running by the time Trikru gets here tomorrow.”

From where he sat on the ground, Bellamy protested, “We’re not giving Mount Weather over to Trikru. This safe haven is rightfully ours.”

“No one said anything about giving away the mountain.” Clarke clarified. “But we can give people shelter until The Council and the Commander can formalize a peace treaty.”

“How do you know so much about this place?” Lincoln asked curiously.

As he and Jasper helped Bellamy get back onto his feet, Monty answered, “They taught us about it on The Ark as a part of our history curriculum. It was always said that when humanity returned to the ground, Mount Weather should be the landing point. It’s the only place guaranteed to have supplies that could’ve withstood the nuclear fallout.”

“What if there are people inside?” Lincoln questioned. “Have you considered that possibility?”

Monty shook his head. “We would’ve heard from the survivors if there were any.”

Lincoln was unconvinced. “What makes you say that?”

Monty replied, “They would’ve known there were twelve stations still in space when the bombs fell. Well, thirteen stations if you count Trikru out at the edge of the solar system. Anyway, if someone actually had time to flee here before the radiation killed them, they would’ve been able to contact any one of those stations before _and_ after The Ark was formed. If someone was here, we would have heard from them a long time ago.”

Lincoln shrugged. “What if they just didn’t want to talk to you?”

Jasper laughed, a little more confident after his pep talk with Monty but still nervous overall. “It almost sounds like you’re hoping we’ll find people just hanging out down here after all this time.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Octavia said before grabbing Lincoln by the arm and leading him deeper into the tunnel. Clarke followed, happy to finally be on the move again. With minimal complaint, Bellamy, Jasper, and Monty headed into the darkness as well.

\--

“Can I ask you a question?” They were the first words Bellamy or Clarke had uttered since they’d parted ways with Lincoln and Octavia at the last branch out. Neither of them was particularly thrilled to be stuck together, but they were behind schedule as it was. Splitting up into pairs had been the obvious choice to make.

Clarke shrugged. “Like what?”

Bellamy turned his flashlight down a corner, but the light only traveled ten or so feet before hitting a solid dead end. He went back to shining his light down the tunnel in front of them, staring into the darkness ahead as he asked, “How do you do it?”

She looked over at him, but he kept his eyes facing forward.

“Do what?” She asked.

“How do you trust in something you don’t even know?”

Clarke let out a long sigh and pondered carefully on her reply before she said, “It’s not about trusting in something that I don’t know. It’s about having faith in humanity. It’s about hoping for a better world, one that doesn’t end in another war. It’s about understanding that these people are not foreigners or aliens, they’re just people in space trying to get home. They’re us with a different history. With a _painful_ history. They dream about skipping through fields of flowers. They play sports, and have parties, and they care about one another. They’re no different than we are.”

With anger dripping from his tone, he asked, “Did the Commander tell you to say all of that before or after you climbed into bed with her?”

Clarke stopped in her tracks and stared at him in disbelief. “What did you just say?”

He turned around slowly, clearly annoyed at their halt in progress. “You heard what I said. Just like I heard you sneak off to go talk to your Commander in the middle of the night. Just like I heard you giggling like a little girl with a crush. Just like I heard it in your voice when you defended her.” He gestured to the bump on his head where she’d hit him with her flashlight. “You care about the Commander. The others might not see it, but I do. You’re just pushing this alliance so you can hook up with some girl you don’t even know.”

“I know plenty about her.” Clarke took a few steps toward him and he backed away quickly, raising his arms to defend himself against any potential flying flashlights. “I know more about her than I know about you! Who even are you, Bellamy Blake? All I know is that you’re the boy who hid his sister under the floor for the first eighteen years of her life. You’re the boy who chose to fight with Trikru in the cafeteria instead of talk to them like a normal person.”

“Don’t try to turn this around.”

“Lexa is a good person.” She said as she resumed walking down the tunnel.

“A person that you have feelings for.” He insisted, trailing after her. “A person who could very easily use those feelings against you to get what she wants. She’s their Commander for a reason. She’s smart. She knows how to twist a situation to get her way, because that’s what good leaders do. They find a way to do what’s best for their people. She will cut you loose the moment that you become an inconvenience to her. If she wouldn’t give up her power for peace, she won’t give up her power for you either.”

“The Ark wasn’t asking for peace. They were asking for assimilation. For total cultural abandonment. They wanted to absorb Trikru and its resources. Jaha wasn’t asking Lexa for peace, he wasn’t asking her to surrender.”

He shook his head and let out a dry laugh. “You are entirely ignoring the point.”

“There’s no point to address. You’re claiming that Lexa is some kind of a heartless dictator who will fuck me over. She’s not like that. She wants peace. It’s the only thing that she’s been fighting for.”

“There’s more that she’s after and you know it.” He replied. “She wouldn’t be half as invested in this alliance if you weren’t the one negotiating it. Just admit that your feelings give you bias.”

“Whatever is going on between us is none of your business.” Clarke knew that confirming she had feelings for Lexa was a dangerous move, but she was running out of ideas. “We both want peace. We both want an alliance. The real question here is how do you not want the same thing? Why are you so against The Ark and Trikru working side by side in harmony together?”

“Because people don’t just work together like that anymore. That ended for our species about a hundred years ago when they blew up the world. And I think it’s safe to assume that none of those bombs were launched with harmony in mind.”

Rather than debate him more, Clarke sped up her pace and continued down the tunnel.

\--

“So what do we do now?” Jasper asked the very question that was on the tip of Clarke’s tongue.

“Hang on.” Monty said as he wiped a thick layer of dust from the screen of a control panel inserted into the tunnel wall. “I recognize that brand logo. I might know how to use this program. It should be something similar to the older versions of code our Earth ancestors first used on The Ark.”

Using the hand that wasn’t shining his flashlight on the locked door adjacent to him, Monty placed his palm firmly over the control panel’s screen. The device lit up beneath his hand, though it took several moments to reach maximum brightness.

“It will need a passcode.” Lincoln assumed, watching the panel turn on over Monty’s shoulder.

“We’ll deal with that when we have to.” Monty replied distractedly. Buttons appeared on the screen, and he began clicking on them. A loud noise sounded from the machine, startling them all.

“What happened?” Jasper asked frantically.

Monty threw up his hands. “There’s a passcode.”

Irritated, Lincoln muttered, “Told you so.”

“Okay.” Bellamy placed his hands on his hips and surveyed their group. “What’s the next plan then? Where do we go from here?”

“Can you try random passwords until we find one that works?” Octavia asked.

“I don’t think so. It might lock me out if I’m wrong too many times.” Monty answered, dividing his attention between the Blake siblings and the control panel. He clicked around a few more times before the same noise blared out again. He stepped away from the panel and began to pace the tunnel floor with his hands over his face.

Octavia gave him a curious look.

“What is he doing?” She asked the group.

Jasper laughed and answered, “He’s thinking. He used to do this all the time when we were kids.”

Monty stopped in the middle of the tunnel and stared at the control panel. Thinking aloud, he said, “Of course. It’s so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”

“See what?” Lincoln asked mere moments before Monty grabbed the spear from his hand and launched it directly at the control panel.

The spear cracked the screen, sending small shards of glass into the dirt and creating a hole filled with layers of circuit boards and wires. Monty pulled the spear out, needing both hands and most of his body weight just to get it free. He carefully handed the spear back to Lincoln before shining his light into the hole. A few of the severed wires shot out sparks, but Monty seemed unafraid of electrocution as he reached his hand inside and began poking around with a specific component. The door unlocked with a loud clang, which sent each of them stumbling around scared. Bellamy, Lincoln, and Jasper all raised their spears defensively, and lowered them in unison as they realized there was no real danger.

Fearlessly, Octavia approached the door and pulled the heavy thing open. She walked inside, with Clarke and the others right behind her.

“Wow.” Octavia muttered as they filtered into a long, dark hallway. “It just hit me that I’m back under the floor.”

“You’re not under the floor.” Bellamy retorted, keeping close to his sister’s side. “You’re underground. There’s a difference.”

“Damn right there’s a difference.” Octavia murmured. She stalled herself, allowing for Clarke to take the lead as they walked deeper into the Mount Weather facility.

After a few silent moments, Monty asked the group, “Should we split up again and look for the control room? We’ll need to find the dam’s engineering room too, but that’ll be Raven’s area of expertise.”

“We don’t need to split up.” Clarke replied as she noticed something tacked onto the wall in front of her. She brought up her light to get a better look at it. “We’ve got a map.”

“A map?” Monty excitedly rushed to her side as Bellamy tried to open the large bulky door protruding from the tunnel wall next to them.

“Anyone home?” Bellamy called out as he stuck his head through the doorway. When he leaned back into the long hall where the others stood waiting, he added, “There’s another door through here. It’s got a control panel hooked up to it. There's an old clearance card scanner too, one that looks a lot like the scanner we’ve got back on The Ark.”

“Oh, no problem. I can bypass one of those.” Monty brushed off Bellamy’s concern, his eyes still glued to the map on the wall. “Looks like we’ll be entering the facility somewhere on level four. It’s hard to tell for sure though. The mine tunnels aren’t even marked on this thing.”

Clarke brushed her fingertips over the map, leaving clean trails in the dust. “This place is even bigger than I thought it would be. We could fit everyone down here, just look at all of that space! Trikru and The Ark wouldn't even have to live separately."

Jasper grinned. “We could repopulate the Earth just from Mount Weather. Could you imagine a bunch of Trikru-Ark kids running around these tunnels, telling old stories about their Space ancestors who came back to the ground?”

“No.” Bellamy grumbled. “I sure can't."

Perhaps solely to annoy her brother, Octavia replied to Jasper, “I can.”

Before the Blakes could get into another argument, Clarke left the map and pushed past Bellamy to enter the next section.

“Oh. Woah.” Clarke muttered as she noticed the pipes overhead. “This looks like some kind of decontamination room.”

Monty appeared by her side and began to tamper with the clearance card scanner. “I’d guess you're right. I bet they planned to use this room to keep the radiation out whenever someone new showed up. Too bad no one ever got the chance to use it.”

“Yeah. Too bad.” Jasper agreed, eagerly looking over Monty’s shoulder to check on his progress.

The card scanner flashed green as the door behind them slammed shut on its own, nearly hitting Lincoln in the process. The pipes overhead rattled and suddenly a freezing cold liquid began to rain down on them. Clarke gasped as the icy liquid hit her skin, chilling her right to the bone. She wrapped her arms around herself and waited with her teeth gritted for the shower to end.

“What the hell was that?” Jasper shouted as the pipes finally ceased their downpour. All of their flashlights and spears sat on the ground where they’d been dropped. The spears were unbothered, but the flashlights were surely useless to them now.

“Decontamination.” Monty groaned. “And it’s not over yet."

From large grated vents in the floor, air blew up at them and filled the small space with a chalky powder. At first the powder seemed harmless, but then came the burning.

“What is this stuff?” Octavia cried as she desperately attempted to scrape it off of her face and neck.

“Hold on. There should be mo—“ Monty’s warning was cut off by a second wave of cold liquid pouring down from the pipes.

Clarke used the liquid to wash the powder from her skin, and soon the others followed her lead.

A computerized voice sounded from the control panel and said, “Sterilization complete. Standby for transfer to quarantine on level three.”

“Quarantine?” Jasper asked, panicking already.

“Relax.” Bellamy urged. “There’s no one here to transfer us anywhere. It's probably just an automated response they programmed into it.”

The final door separating the outside world from Mount Weather unlocked with a series of loud bangs, followed by the door opening in a dramatic swing. Cold and dripping wet, the group gathered their dropped items and entered the facility.

\--

“This is incredible. Look at those turbines move!” Raven beamed as she watched her genius in action. Clarke looked around the cavernous engineering room, satisfied with how lit up and noisy it had become in just a few short hours. Raven had been very busy indeed.

“So just these five things can power the entire mountain?” Clarke questioned once more, still having a hard time understanding how everything worked.

Raven had explained the process twice already, but her enthusiasm remained steady. “Look, all you have to know is that the dam generates a lot of hydroelectric power, more energy than we'll ever actually use at one time. And every bit of juice necessary to get this mountain up and running will end up being processed right here in this room. Pretty cool, right?”

“Yeah. Pretty cool.” Clarke didn’t have it in her to fake some interest this time around. 

“You look tired.” Raven noted. “Why don’t you go get some rest? You probably haven’t slept for a whole night since you hit your head during the bridge explosion.”

“I’m okay.” Clarke lied. “I slept fine last night.”

Raven gave her a knowing look. “That’s funny. I could’ve sworn that I saw you run off into the woods with a radio tucked under your arm. Must've been some other lovestruck blonde instead. My mistake."

Clarke was too tired to find any humor in Raven's teasing. “Why is everyone keeping tabs on me lately?”

“You must be talking about Bellamy. I saw him out walking around outside in the clearing last night. I think he was patrolling the camp. That dude is seriously paranoid. I mean, come on, as if a wild animal could actually get inside the cargo plane on its own.” Raven paused to adjust something on the handmade leg brace that she'd spent most of her previous day creating. “You went off to have a late night chat with the Commander, didn’t you?”

“I did.” Clarke answered truthfully. There was no point in denying it now.

Raven watched her carefully. “Man, you’re in deep with her already, aren’t you? I can see it all over your face. Just talking about her lights you up. You, my friend, have been bitten by the love bug.”

Ignoring Raven’s comments, Clarke turned on her heels and headed back to the stairwell.

“Can I just ask you something?” Raven quickly chased after her, the brace on her injured leg squeaking with every step.

Clarke paused mid-step to allow Raven her one question.

“What exactly do you think’s going to happen when Trikru gets here? I mean, you said they’re already on the way, right? Their ETA is about forty-eight hours after your initial touchdown on Earth. That means The Ark can’t even begin reentry for another fourteen hours after Trikru gets here, and then everyone will have to hike here from wherever their station happens to land. So, what happens in the meantime? What do we do with Trikru until The Council gets here? Clarke, I don't want to freak you out, but it could be days before we actually see any other Arkers around here. How do we keep this place from falling into Trikru’s hands until then? How are we supposed to provide shelter and supplies to Trikru and then just expect them to leave without complaint when our people finally decide to show up? I don’t know how that’s going to work. We have clean water here. Supplies. Power. Electricity! This is the ultimate safe haven. They're going to want to keep it for themselves."

“It will work.” Though Clarke wasn’t entirely confident in Trikru’s stability, she couldn’t let anyone see her worry. The entire alliance would depend on how the next few days played out.

“How can you be so sure? I know you trust the Commander, but at the end of the day she has hundreds of people to think about. Are you really more important to her than shelter for her people? You saw how cold it can get outside at night. I can’t imagine Trikru leaving without putting up a fight.”

Raven had a point.

“I don’t know.” Clarke yielded. “I wish I could say that I have complete faith in Lexa to do the right thing, but I don’t know. We just have to do the best we can to hold things together until Chancellor Kane can formalize a peace treaty with her. After that, Trikru won’t have a choice but to leave. If they fight for the mountain, they’ll lose the alliance.”

“Where will they go?” Raven watched her closely. “You wouldn’t leave us and go with them, would you?”

Clarke bit her bottom lip as she thought it over. “Like I said, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just taking it day by day.”

“Abby wouldn’t want you to go.” Raven reminded her. “And neither would I.”

Clarke shrugged. “It’s not like I wouldn’t be able to come back.”

Raven sighed. “Yeah, well, that’s exactly what we were thinking when we crossed the bridge. And we didn’t exactly make it back onto The Ark after that, did we?”

Clarke fell silent, unsure of everything except a handful of certain truths: the radiation levels were survivable, Trikru and The Ark were coming to the ground, and in the morning Lexa would be with her again.

“Everything will work out.” Clarke finally replied as they continued up the stairwell. “It has to."


	9. Homemade Serum

“Our guests have finally arrived.” Jasper’s voice flowed freely through the radio that was clipped to Clarke’s belt. “Uh, hold up. Something is wrong. Bellamy’s got the binoculars on them. He says that we need to prep level three. I guess they’ve got a lot of injured people they’re about to bring in. Clarke, are you hearing all of this?”

Clarke snatched the small two-way radio from her belt and brought it up to her mouth. “I’m already in Medical. What kind of injuries are we talking about?”

“Uh…um…I don’t know. It’s too hard to tell. I’m up on the ridge overlooking the clearing. Give me a second. I’m going to get a closer look.” Jasper’s voice fell silent for a few tense moments. “Okay. Bellamy and Lincoln just opened the main door. There’s a lot of shouting going on down there. People are burnt, Clarke. It looks really bad. Did they have a crash landing?”

“Anything is possible.” Clarke replied while using her free hand to begin prepping the essentials. “Talk to Bellamy once everyone is inside. He’ll probably want you to stay on lookout.”

Murphy suddenly appeared in the doorway, briefly drawing Clarke’s attention away from her task.

He pointed to the radio in her hand and said, “I heard the chatter. It’s the radiation. It’s affecting Trikru differently than it affects us. Better tell the guards to send them all through sterilization.”

“How would you know that? We haven’t even seen them yet.” Clarke secured her radio back onto her belt, all the while ignoring Jasper’s continued descriptions of how burnt and blistered the incoming people looked.

Rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, Murphy took a few more steps into the room and said, “I’ve been thinking about it. The radiation levels, I mean. Why are we so unaffected by them? According to The Ark, we should be dead right now. They told us that the ground wouldn’t be safe to live on for another hundred years.”

“What’s your point?” Clarke cut in.

He laughed to himself and crossed his arms over his chest. “My point…is that there’s a reason we aren’t dead right now. Over the generations, our bodies adapted to life in space, right? That means we adapted to sunlight. It means we can withstand greater levels of radiation here on the ground.”

Clarke grew angry. “If you knew all of this, why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”

“I wasn’t sure.” He answered defensively. “I’m not a mechanical engineering genius or a tech geek or an Ark Guard Cadet. I’ve had nothing to validate my theory.”

“What about Lincoln?” Clarke asked skeptically. “If their injuries were caused by exposure to excessive levels of radiation, he would’ve died on the first day.”

Murphy nodded. “And that’s why I never said anything. He’s been outside the mountain more than any of us. He’s been out there scouting and hunting like it’s no big deal. And yet hundreds of his people are about to enter this bunker with radiation poisoning. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Clarke could feel herself beginning to panic, but she couldn’t stifle her rising anxiety no matter how hard she tried.

“You should have warned me! We could have prepared this place better. We could’ve brought down more of the medical supplies from storage. I could’ve had time to radio my mom and ask her about treating this kind of thing.”

“There’s no point in getting all upset about it.” Murphy paused to prop open the door to Medical. “We just need to get this place ready to be used. They’ve got doctors and scientists of their own, don’t they? Those people will know what to do. They can talk us through everything.”

“Why are you doing this?” Clarke asked, bewildered that Murphy was offering to assist her in caring for Trikru. “Why are you helping me? I thought you wanted to live away from The Council? You said you were going to leave.”

Murphy shrugged. “Can’t exactly go off and live with other people if those other people all die.”

“No one is dying here today.” Clarke took in a deep, shaky breath. “Not if we can help it.”

\--

The first time that Clarke caught a glimpse of Lexa, the blonde’s gloved hands were covered in Trikru blood. Looking like some kind of mythical majestic warrior, the Commander had appeared in the doorway, bloody and covered in dirt, with her adviser Anya lying unconscious in her arms. She shouted for assistance, sounding more desperate and fearful than Clarke had ever heard her sound before. A crowd of people immediately gathered around their Heda to help, obscuring Clarke’s view.

Clarke had released close to fifty people from the Med wing by the time she caught sight of Lexa again. The Commander remained in the doorway as she called over a Trikru doctor, leaving her only partially visible to Clarke, but it was enough to draw Clarke’s attention away from the patient in front of her.

Clarke’s exhaustion had begun to catch up to her. She felt lightheaded and shaky as she applied bandage after bandage to the wounds that Trikru’s specialists had already attended to. Clarke was the checkout girl, the ‘patch you up and send you on your way’ girl. Though her tasks were time-consuming and repetitive, she was grateful that actual doctors were there to perform the harder jobs. So far, she’d only been forced to give one ‘there is nothing we can do’ talk, but even just that one shattering of someone’s hopes and dreams had been enough to shake Clarke to the very core of her being.

The third time that Clarke saw Lexa inside Mount Weather, the would-be nurse emerged from Medical into a stairwell drenched in sweat and short of breath. Lexa stood perfectly still a few steps above her, one hand on the railing and the other holding a canteen. She had showered and changed into different clothes, but the tortured look in her eyes remained.

Clarke ceased all movement when she finally noticed the Commander on the steps above her. She’d been seconds away from falling into another panic attack, but Lexa’s sudden presence seemed to shock her out of it.

Slowly, Lexa descended the last four stairs until she was on level ground with Clarke. Offering the canteen to her, Lexa said, “I came down to bring you water. You need to stay hydrated. You’ve been on your feet without a break for the last ten hours. You should rest.”

“I can rest when I know everyone will survive the night.” Clarke grabbed the canteen from Lexa’s hand and proceeded to down a third of it in one go.

“There’s no one left to treat.” Lexa reminded her. “You’ve done everything that you can. My doctors can handle it from here. You can rest.”

“No. I need to be in there. Too many of your…too many people died. I can’t let anyone else die. I need to be in there. I have to keep watch over them. If something goes wrong, I need to fix it.” Clarke shoved the canteen back into Lexa’s hand as she began to frantically undo her ponytail. Her fingers shook as they combed through greasy hair. Specks of dried blood appeared on her hands. She had to swallow back the urge to vomit as a few of the flecks drifted into the air like dust.

Quietly, Lexa said, “None of those deaths were your fault.”

Clarke pressed her back flat against the cold cement wall behind her. The stairwell felt amazing compared to the Med wing—like exiting a humid rainforest and entering a refrigerator—but it did nothing to help with her dizziness or the constant layer of sweat that covered her skin.

Finally, Clarke grimly replied, “Forty-eight of your people died today because I told you the ground was inhabitable. I’m the one to blame for their deaths. I told you it would be safe for you here. It’s my fault.”

“The ground _is_ inhabitable.” Lexa said as she screwed the cap back onto her canteen and slung its strap around her shoulder. “If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I should’ve allowed my scientists time to study the conditions themselves. All of this could’ve been avoided if only I’d given them a chance to send a test team down first.”

Clarke let out a long sigh but couldn’t find the strength to argue. It would be pointless to try; neither girl was about to allow the other to take on sole blame.

Lexa offered the canteen again. “You should keep drinking.”

Clarke weakly took the offer, needing both hands just to hold it steady as she brought it up to her lips.

Lexa jumped at the opportunity to express a few more of her thoughts while Clarke drank up.

“I also came down to thank you. Thank you for taking care of my injured. You saved the lives of people who imprisoned you. Of people who wanted to use Reapers on you. Of would-be Reapers themselves. I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been for you.”

Abruptly, Clarke pushed herself from the wall. Somewhere in the chaos, perhaps the hour when she could hear nothing but the screams of the dying ringing in her ears, Clarke had forgotten about the political tensions threatening to restart a civil war for the Trikru people. Somewhere in the madness of her day, Clarke had forgotten that those people who had been thrashing around in pure agony on the beds and floors were anything but lives that needed to be saved. They had not been Azgedians, nor Grounders or advisers or Reapers or guards. They’d only been humans in pain to her.

“Clarke?” Lexa took a cautious step closer to her. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

“I just need a minute.” Clarke waved away the Commander’s concern as she physically turned herself away from the other girl. She planted the palm of her hands against the wall and leaned into them to support herself. Staring at her own boots, both of which had streaks of blood smeared on them, Clarke said, “We need to discuss a few things. In private.”

Lexa looked around the empty stairwell, confused as to why Clarke required more privacy than they already had.

Eventually, she replied, “Okay. Where would you prefer to meet?”

Clarke dropped her hands from the wall and turned around to face her.

“Be in my room in one hour.”

\--

Lexa, as it turned out, had been right about Clarke needing a break. Even simple things like a hot shower, a good meal, and being off her feet were all she needed to get her head back in the right frame of mind.

Clarke’s room in Mount Weather was roughly the size of her room on The Ark, though it more closely resembled her cell in lockup with its lack of furniture and bland color scheme. The door led out to the main living quarters, where a small kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room could all be found. The door to a master bedroom was between the bathroom and the door to Clarke’s chosen room. The bigger room belonged to Abby and Raven, though neither woman would be sleeping in it anytime soon. The doctor was still in space on The Ark and the mechanic was busy spending all of her nights working in the control room with Monty. Keeping an underground bunker as extensive and complex as Mount Weather running at maximum efficiency, they quickly learned, was a full-time job.

“What is it that you wish to discuss?” Lexa asked from where she sat on a metal chair adjacent to Clarke’s bed. Free of burns or blisters of any kind, she looked beautifully pristine. In space, on the ground, underground; it didn’t matter. She was always the most captivating person in the room. 

Bluntly, Clarke asked, “Why are only some of your people immune to the radiation? Two hundred and ninety-four of your people walked into this mountain today. Forty-eight of those people died. I want to know why sixteen of you showed no signs of injury. Look at yourself, Lexa. You don’t even have a scratch on you.”

“Nightblood is the common factor that you’re looking for.” Lexa answered.

Clarke was lost. “Okay. What the hell is nightblood?”

“It goes back to the first Commander.” Lexa explained. “She injected herself with a black substance of her own creation. It was a sort of proto-Reaper serum designed to increase her odds of survival if a conflict were to occur. Though it was made to improve several areas of concern, nightblood was considered to be nothing more than a hereditary permanent alteration to the color of one’s blood. Today, Bekka Pramheda’s descendants have learned that she was successful in at least one aspect of the original design: a substantial increase to the human body’s tolerance for radioactivity.”

Clarke waited several moments before saying, “So…you’re related to Lincoln and the other ten people who can walk around outside unharmed?”

She nodded. “Yes. Bekka Pramheda was my Earth ancestor. Her youngest son married the only daughter of Lincoln’s Earth ancestor. Nearly everyone from Trikru is connected in one way or another."

Changing the subject, Clarke asked, “What are you planning to do with your people while we wait for mine to arrive?”

The question puzzled her. “I don’t understand. Are you implying you want us to leave the mountain? You know we won’t survive on our own until our bodies have had the proper amount of time to adjust to the radiation outside."

Clarke shook her head. “That’s not what I’m saying. I know that Trikru isn’t leaving Mount Weather anytime soon. I just want to know if those Azgedians you’re always talking about are going to cause any problems in the meantime.”

“I doubt that they would try to rebel against your hospitality, especially when your people have armed themselves with guns. I was there to witness Roan and Ontari see your people with assault rifles outside. To attack without weapons of equal measure would be a guaranteed suicide mission for them. I don’t think they’re that desperate to secede from Trikru just yet. If they have any sense left in them, they’ll wait and join the peace treaty as an independent political entity.”

“You’re sure they won’t try to take the mountain from us?” Clarke needed to be certain. If she had any hope of getting rest in the night, she had to know that her people would be safe.

“I wouldn’t bet my life on it.” Lexa answered honestly. “But without weapons or Reapers, the Azgedians are stuck here. It takes more than brute strength or foolish arrogance to win a gunfight with only your fists.”

“Okay.” Clarke dropped the subject, knowing that if she kept worrying it would lead to a nervous breakdown. “How’s everyone else doing? How are your advisers?”

“They’re alive and resting comfortably in rooms of their own thanks to you. The extent of their injuries could have been much worse if you hadn’t been there to help.”

“How are you feeling?” Clarke asked, unafraid to show that she cared.

Lexa’s gaze fell to the floor. “About as well as I can.”

The room fell silent for a few moments. Clarke looked up at the ceiling above them, wondering just how many miles beneath the surface they were.

“I feel so bad.” Clarke admitted as she rubbed her tired eyes. “Your people have come all this way, from the very edge of the solar system, just to be trapped in an underground bunker.”

“Don’t feel bad for us.” Lexa insisted. “Please. You’ve done nothing but help us. There is no blood on your hands. Your conscience is clear. No one blames you for anything.”

“Then why do I feel like shit?” Clarke questioned. “Why do I feel like I did more harm than good?”

“You stopped a war.” Lexa reminded her. “You saved lives. You singlehandedly brought humanity back to the ground.” She smiled. “You’re a hero, Clarke. And I truly hope that someday you’ll be able to see that.”

Clarke groaned. “How can you be so happy? Forty-eight of your people died today. Why aren’t you grieving for them?” 

Lexa stood from her chair and approached the bed. Taking a seat at the edge beside Clarke, she answered, “I do grieve for my people. I felt each of their deaths like it was my own. While you were caring for the living, those of us with nightblood carried our dead back to the surface. We didn’t know what to do with all of the bodies. They just kept piling up. One right after the other. It seemed endless at the time.” She paused to keep her emotions in check. “We decided it would be best to burn them. On Trikru, we always cremated the dead and scattered their ashes outside the station. But that was in a controlled environment. We nearly set the whole forest on fire today. I can still feel the heat of the flames on my skin.”

Acting on instinct, Clarke reached out and held Lexa’s hand. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Lexa assured her. “We all grieve differently. Knowing that you care enough to question my feelings is actually a comfort.”

Taking a risk, Clarke asked, “Back on Trikru, did you kiss me because you thought I was going to die?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Of course it does.”

Lexa looked down at their hands as she softly ran her thumb over Clarke’s knuckles.

“I kissed you because I wanted to.” She finally answered. “And because I thought I’d never get the chance to do it again.”

“After everything that's happened, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to…” Clarke trailed off, unable to find the right words.

Even with no one around to hear them, Lexa kept her voice low. “I would die before I gave up on this peace treaty. You have to believe that. I won’t let anyone bully me into going against you. Not this time.”

“That’s not what I was trying to say, but thank you. That means a lot.” Clarke let out a heavy sigh. “I just…I feel like with every decision I make, there’s always an easy road and a hard road, and I keep picking the hard one. I knew it was dangerous to go against The Council and cross the bridge, but I did it anyway. I knew it was dangerous to come down to Earth. I knew it was dangerous to let your people in the mountain when you outnumber us.” She hesitated before adding, “And I knew it was dangerous to kiss you back.”

Lexa moved closer to her on the bed, leaning in until their lips met. Disregarding the circumstances and her own exhaustion, Clarke kissed her back in full force.

In that brief, beautiful moment, Clarke forgot about the harsh world around them. She was no longer humanity’s savior, nor was she the girl who broke in and out of Trikru, nor was she the girl who took a doomed escape pod to the ground. She was just Clarke. Just a girl allowing herself to feel something other than heartache for a change.

A loud boom somewhere within the mountain broke them apart, starling both girls off the bed and onto their feet. Clarke reached for the radio on her nightstand and clicked it to the right frequency.

“Talk to me, Raven. What’s going on?”

The two girls were already running through the halls of level six by the time a response from Raven came.

“The noise didn’t come from us. Everything looks fine from the control room. I was worried it could’ve been a turbine, but everything in Engineering is showing up as fully operational. Over.”

Clarke and Lexa froze in their tracks as the lights went out. They searched for one another in the pitch black, finding each other’s arms just before the flashing emergency lights turned on. A few of Lexa’s people emerged from the nearby residences, all of them confused and clutching at their bandaged injuries.

“Return to your temporary homes.” Lexa ordered. “Whatever the issue is, we will find a way to fix it. Please, get the rest you need. If any assistance is required, we will come to you.”

The majority of those who had found the strength to venture into the halls returned to the comfort of their rooms without complaint. The girls waited until the hall was empty before they found and opened the nearest stairwell door. As they stood in the doorway, distant screams reached their ears.

“Clarke!” Octavia’s voice abruptly sounding through the radio caused Clarke to jump.

“Go for Clarke.” She said after bringing the radio up to her mouth.

“Lincoln and I were out hunting and now the tunnel door won’t open for us. What’s going on? Our flashlights are going to run out soon if someone doesn’t come let us in.”

Clarke shared a worried glance with Lexa. Speaking into the radio, she replied, “Something is wrong. The mountain put itself on some kind of a lockdown. Raven and Monty don't know why. We all heard a noise though. A loud one. Did you hear it out there?”

“No, we didn’t hear anything.” Octavia answered distractedly.

Clarke turned back to Lexa. “That means it came from inside the mountain.”

“But what could make such a loud noise if it wasn’t a mechanical failure?” Lexa questioned. “And why are there people screaming upstairs?"

“Clarke?” Octavia asked. “You there?”

“Still here.” Clarke replied quickly.

“We just heard a noise out here.” There was a long pause, followed by Octavia’s whisper, “There’s something in the tunnel with us.”

Lexa rushed into the stairwell, pulling Clarke behind her as they ran upstairs.

“Just hold on. We’re on the way.” Clarke said into the radio seconds before it slipped out of her sweaty grip, causing them to stop halfway to level five as she dropped down to retrieve it.

She opened her mouth to say something to Lexa, but the sound of a stairwell door slamming open somewhere above them cut her off. A person, completely out of sight from Clarke and Lexa, descended several steps before letting out a bloodcurdling scream. They heard grunts of a physical altercation, followed by the unceremonious pushing of a body over the railing. They watched as the blur of movement passed them by. They cringed when the sound of bones snapping traveled up to them from the bottom.

Lexa placed both hands on the railing and looked over the side. Whispering, she said, “It’s them.”

“It’s who?” Clarke joined her at the railing, checking above and below them. Nothing but flashing lights greeted her above, and only a dead body surrounded by a growing pool of blood could be found below.

Lexa gripped the railing so tightly her knuckles turned white.

“The Reapers.” She said, her voice trembling. “They’re going to kill us all.”


	10. The Reckoning

Clarke peered over the railing once more to observe the body below. It was difficult to get a good look at the bloodied face with the flashing emergency lights running, but the eccentric hairstyle stood out to her.

“I’ve seen him before.” Clarke whispered, struggling to keep herself together. “He was one of the first people to be released from Medical.”

Lexa released her tight grip on the railing and began to ascend the stairs once more. She beckoned for Clarke to follow as she revealed, “He was a Reaper.”

While following the Commander’s lead, Clarke asked, “How do you know that for sure?”

“Because I authorized his induction to the program.” She explained, stopping short to check above them for any signs of the person who’d pushed the Reaper over the railing. “When we first made contact with The Ark, Titus insisted that I initiate the Cerberus Project: an offensive strategy explicitly reserved for external conflict with other lifeforms. When we recreated a weaker Reaper serum after the dark days, we never meant to use it. We only meant to keep it as a last resort. Our self-destruct button, some would say.” She paused to check over the railing once more, as if she expected the dead body below to suddenly rise and walk away. “The volunteers who'd stepped forward were all Azgedian descendants, all people that Roan and Ontari were close to, but I had no choice other than to accept them. I couldn’t turn them away. I would never be able to force a person to sacrifice their life and become a monster.”

Clarke remained still as she processed the new information. After a few pensive moments, she asked, “How many volunteers were there?”

“Five.” Lexa answered. As an afterthought, she added, “But Roan and Ontari could have recruited more. The radiation poisoning frightened everyone, not just the Azgedians. People can be unpredictable when they’re scared, even the ones you trust. You’d better count your friends, Clarke. If there are other Reapers roaming Mount Weather, then this place is no longer a safe home for us; it’s a tomb.”

Clarke shook her head as pure anger coursed throughout her. Though much of their predicament was still shrouded in mystery, one fact remained very clear. “This mountain is ours. Yesterday it was ours, today it’s ours, and you can bet your ass that tomorrow it will _still_ be ours. No one is taking this mountain from us, especially not a group of selfish radicals who would’ve died if we hadn’t let them inside in the first place.”

Lexa sent a wary glance her way. “You don’t know what we’re up against. The two of us have no weapons. We have no idea what sections of the mountain this lockdown is affecting, or who set it off, or why it’s even happening. What’s your plan? To run around blindly swinging our fists at anything that moves? Roan and Ontari may already have their hands on your guns for all we know.”

Whether her newfound confidence was rational or not, Clarke took the lead in their trek upstairs. Over her shoulder she replied, “We’re wasting time. We need to go open the tunnel door for Octavia and Lincoln. As long as the Reaper isn't a nightblood like you, the radiation will kill it before it can hurt them. They still have a chance."

Lexa reached out and grabbed her by the arm, effectively pulling Clarke back down a step. “You’re not listening to me! If there is a Reaper outside in the tunnel with them, Lincoln and Octavia are already dead. We have to be practical. We can’t go around just barging into any room we feel like. Until we know for certain that there's no threat, we need to proceed as if there’s danger around every corner. More than just our lives are at stake right now. Tonight could decide the very fate of humanity.”

“I know you’re trying to be a good leader right now. I get that. It’s what you were trained to do. But if my people are in danger, I’m not going to just stand by and let them die. I’m going up there to open that door, with or without you.” Clarke wasn’t quite finished with her rant, but static noise from the radio clipped to her belt alerted them to an incoming message.

“Clarke, are you still there?” Octavia’s voice was a welcome sound.

She let out a sigh of relief before replying, “Go for Clarke.”

“We couldn’t find the source of the sound, but we’re backtracking to the tunnel entrance now. Hopefully we can make it there before our flashlights run out of batteries. We’re going to try the front door. Over.”

“Stay safe. And switch over to the guard frequency. I’ll do the same. Over and out.” Clarke didn’t bother to wait for a response as she hurriedly switched channels.

They caught Bellamy midsentence saying, “—and stay there. I mean it. No one goes in or out of this mountain until I know what’s going on. I’m headed back to the control room to check with Raven and Monty. Over.”

“Roger that.” Jasper’s nervous voice was much more garbled by static than Bellamy’s had been.

“What about me?” Miller asked.

“Go down to level six. I want the door to the main stairwell guarded. We need to keep Trikru as contained as possible. Over.” Bellamy answered.

Removing Lexa’s hand from her arm, Clarke returned to the task of pulling the Commander forward. The radio chatter continued, but the girls only partially listened as they climbed the stairs.

“Where are you going now?” Lexa asked tensely. "Lincoln and Octavia don't need us to open the door."

Thinking on her feet, Clarke tossed out the only location that made any sense. “The control room. If anyone can figure out what’s going on, it’s Raven and Monty. And if are other Reapers, then we’ll need to warn Bellamy too.”

Lexa groaned. “I don’t trust Octavia’s brother to target only the Reapers. I doubt he’ll stop to ask if someone is a Grounder or an Azgedian before he guns them down.”

Clarke didn’t have the time to debate the issue, but she couldn’t deny that Lexa had a point. “Look, I don’t really like him all that much either, but he’s a trained Ark Guard Cadet. He and Miller know how to take down an assailant, how to use weapons, how to fight, how to…”

“How to kill anyone who isn’t an Arker?” Lexa heatedly supplied.

Just as Clarke was about to defend the Arkers, the pair reached the landing to level four and suddenly Clarke found herself speechless at the sight before them. Lying on her side in pile of unraveled bloody bandages was Lexa’s most trusted adviser, Anya. Her eyes fluttered open at the sound of their approach.

“Heda.” She murmured weakly as she reached out her arm toward them, every inch of it burnt and blistered.

Clarke found it difficult to discern an expression through the healing marks on Anya’s face, but it was clear by her tone that the loyal adviser was relieved to see her Commander unharmed.

Lexa fell to her knees beside Anya and feebly began to reapply the mess of bandages.

“I’m here. You’re going to be okay.” Lexa forced a smile through her distress.

“You must leave.” Anya warned as she pushed Lexa’s hands away from her injuries.

“I won’t leave you here.” Lexa replied, disgusted at the very idea of abandoning her.

“You must leave the mountain.” Anya fell into a brief coughing fit before going on. “The Reapers will kill you. Then Trikru will fall and Azgeda will inherit the Earth. You cannot let our legacy die beneath the surface like this. You must flee.”

“There is no honor in leaving my people to be slaughtered.” Lexa refused.

Anya coughed up a few drops of blood, swallowed hard, and let her head fall back against the ground with an audible thump. She allowed her eyes to slip shut and replied, “There are many dishonorable people in this mountain, but you, Heda, are not one of them.”

“I’m not leaving.” Lexa repeated forcibly. “I won’t abandon my people.”

Straining herself to get out the words, Anya urged, “Leave me. Go. Before it’s too late.”

Lexa’s bottom lip trembled as she held back tears. “I won’t leave you here to die.”

“If you stay, we all die.” Anya looked over to Clarke and added, “A Reaper cannot be reasoned with. Empathy and fear are forgotten to them. They are mindless killers. Every life in this mountain will be taken by them. You must leave.”

“We can beat them. We have guns. We outnumber them.” Clarke replied, checking over her shoulder just to be safe.

“What were you doing so far from your room?” Lexa asked Anya before the adviser could disagree with Clarke’s optimism.

Anya’s entire body shook as she answered, “I was lured out. Roan…Ontari…they requested my help.”

“Why wasn’t I notified?” Lexa pressed.

“I didn’t want to disturb you.” Anya replied simply. Opening her eyes and sending a glance to Clarke, she added, “You were preoccupied.”

Stepping forward, Clarke asked, “Where did you find the Reaper?”

Anya’s eyes closed again as she lost the strength to keep them open. “I had only just opened the door…when he came running at me.”

“Come on.” Lexa offered her hand to Anya. “We’ll get you back to your room. You’ll be safe there.”

Hurried footsteps echoed throughout the stairwell, alerting them to an approaching figure. With only a radio in hand, Clarke jumped across Anya and readied herself to face whoever was about to find them.

After rounding the corner and nearly tripping over his own feet, Nathan Miller skidded to a halt and raised his gun. Several tense moments passed before he relaxed and lowered his weapon.

“Sorry. I wasn’t expecting to see anyone still awake.” He said, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Reapers.” Clarke answered shortly. She glanced behind her to where Lexa was still kneeling beside Anya.

“Reapers?” He questioned, worried. “I thought you said she destroyed whatever makes those?”

Clarke turned back to Lexa and waited for the Commander to fill in the blanks.

“I did destroy the Reaper serum. All of it.” She finally replied. “They must be using something else. A homemade serum, perhaps. I don’t know.”

Anya curled into herself further as she fell into a coughing fit. Lexa returned her attention to the fallen adviser, leaving Clarke to deal with Miller’s confusion alone.

Descending a few steps on the stairs, he asked, “Are you sure you know what we’re dealing with here?”

“No. No, I don’t know anything for sure.” Clarke responded honestly. “But I do know that something is wrong and people are in danger.”

He fiddled nervously with the gun in his hands. “So what do we do?”

Clarke took a moment to ponder his question before saying, “Fight. That’s we do. We fight. We hold the mountain. We keep what’s ours. No matter what. And we protect the innocent.” She narrowed her gaze on him. “I need you to promise me that you won’t hurt anyone from Trikru unless it’s self-defense.”

He seemed surprised that she doubted his intentions, but gave his word nonetheless. “Yeah. Yeah, I promise. Of course.”

She stepped aside, giving him room to pass. “Go ahead. The people in level six need you. Go keep watch for them. Don’t let anyone come or go.”

He met her at the landing, but hesitated. Looking down to where Lexa was attempting to comfort Anya, he said, “I can take her with me. Put her in a room where the others can look after her.”

“She can’t walk.” Clarke pointed out. “And she needs medical attention.”

Miller was determined. “I can carry her. I’ll be careful.”

Lexa looked up at him, in awe of his kindness. “You would do that?”

He nodded and kneeled down beside them. “It’s not safe to transport her up to Medical. Besides, your doctors have all gone down to the residences for the night. I’ll make sure she gets taken care of. I can handle things from here. You two need to keep moving. You need to put a stop to this before it gets out of hand.”

Lexa placed her hand on his shoulder and looked him directly in the eye as she said with utmost sincerity, “Thank you, my friend.”

\--

Clarke sat on the dusty floor with her back against a desk and a sharpened spear in her hands. Her lungs screamed for air as she held her breath, trying with every fiber of her being not to make a sound. A bead of sweat ran down the side of her face as she hid from the Reaper. He wasn’t far away, no more than a few yards across the lab, but she didn’t dare move to check. If he saw her, that would be the end of it.

As she listened intently to the growing sounds of a monster tossing equipment and chairs throughout the room, she stared at the ticking watch on her wrist. It hung a bit loosely on her arm, still sized to fit her father. There was a small scratch on the glass between the five and six, one that she’d acquired sometime after landing on Earth.

What would he say if he could see her? Would he be proud to see his only daughter bring humanity back to the ground? Would he be proud to see her cowering behind an old piece of furniture? Would he have been happy to join her, to see the trees and the blue skies and rushing waters of a creek? Perhaps, if he was still alive, everyone else would be too. Wells, Finn, Councilwoman Diana Sydney, all of the discarded Trikru bodies that now littered the halls of Mount Weather. Perhaps their deaths could have been avoided if he was there to lead instead of Clarke. Really, what did she know about being a leader? What were her friends thinking when they allowed her to be in charge? To make important decisions? To have their lives resting in her hands? Jake Griffin was the leader they deserved. Not Clarke. Not a girl who cowered behind furniture. Not a girl who foolishly believed in peace, in a treaty that would have to be written in the blood of the innocent.

“Clarke! Clarke! Can you hear me?”

Adrenaline and pure terror coursed throughout her body as Lexa’s voice reached her ears. The two had been separated in their attempt to reach the control room, thwarted by a trio of burly Reapers. The men had appeared so suddenly that the girls hadn’t had time to communicate before running off in different directions. One Reaper followed Clarke, one followed Lexa, and the third took to the stairwell from which they had entered.

“Clarke!” Lexa shouted again from the hall outside, closer this time. The Reaper stopped his chaotic search and listened, waiting to see which girl would enter his line of sight first.

As much as Clarke wanted to fight, as much as she knew Lexa’s life was in danger, she couldn’t bring herself to move. She was stuck. Trapped. Weighted down by fear like it was an anchor tied to her back.

“Clarke!” Lexa was growing increasingly desperate, with worry clear in her tone. 

Clarke anxiously adjusted her sweaty grip on the spear and let out the breath she’d been holding in.

The Reaper grunted as he moved a few of the tables and chairs that he had knocked over during his hunt for Clarke, and it was then that she knew the man was heading for the door. For the sound of Lexa’s voice. For the Commander herself. 

If he opened that door and found Lexa on the other side, he’d rip her limb from limb. They’d seen the remains of others already. The mangled bodies of Trikru guards were spread haphazardly throughout the level. They were faces that Clarke recognized. People that she had seen in her trips across the bridge, men who’d stood guard in the garden when Clarke and Lexa had first met, victims of radiation poisoning. They were courageous innocents who’d risked their lives to stop Azgeda. Even one of Lexa’s advisers, Gustus, had been among them. The dismemberment of his body had captured their attention long enough for the Reapers to happen upon them in the first place.

“Clarke! Are you alive?” Lexa was just outside the door now, her shadow casting upon its window.

Clarke took a chance and peered around the edge of the desk just in time to see the Reaper reaching for the door handle under the emergency lights. Instinctively, Clarke rolled onto her knees, jumped up to her feet, and readied her spear.

“Hey, asshole!” She yelled. The Reaper turned and bared his teeth at her like a wild animal. She launched the spear through the air and, to no one’s surprise, missed entirely.

Empty handed and exposed, Clarke uttered a few curse words under her breath and took off at top speed. She ran for the second exit, jumping over tables and boxes of unused laboratory equipment as she went, fully aware that the Reaper was gaining on her as he barreled through the obstacles.

Clarke tripped over a box of glass beakers, all of which went loudly spilling onto the floor with some shattering into pieces and others rolling in every direction. She scrambled back to her feet and kept running, too afraid to even check how much closer the Reaper surely was.

She was no more than ten feet from the door when it opened and a pair of familiar faces barged inside. Rapid gunfire filled the room, causing Clarke to drop down and cover her ears. She waited, crouched down between tables with her eyes squeezed shut. Only after the dust had settled did she open them again. Slowly, she rose up on shaky legs and faced her saviors.

Lowering the assault rifle in her hands, Lexa stared at Clarke like she was seeing a ghost. Like she’d already assumed the blonde was dead. Like she’d lost hope of ever seeing her again.

Bellamy snatched the gun from Lexa and said to her, “If you ever take my gun again, there _will_ be consequences.”

Clarke smiled, unable to take her eyes off of Lexa. The girl looked beautiful, even with her hair a mess and her clothes soaked in sweat. 

“You took his gun?” She asked in disbelief.

As if tattling to the teacher, Bellamy pointed his finger at Lexa and said, “She kicked me down and stole it right out of my hands!”

“I had to.” Lexa replied quietly, recovering from her momentary daze. “There wasn’t time to ask politely.”

He shook his head, infuriated. “I was already coming in here to save her. You didn't have to take my gun and do it yourself."

“Well you weren’t moving fast enough.” Lexa fired back.

While the two began to argue over proper war etiquette, Clarke turned and searched for the Reaper. She spotted his body just a few tables back, lying dead on the floor with his eyes wide open and his arm still outstretched toward her. Even in his final moments, killing Clarke had been the only thing on his mind.

She crossed the room, traversing the mess of obstacles carefully as she went. After finding her spear, she opened the first door and walked out into the hallway. Lexa and Bellamy exited from the other end, and the three met halfway.

Though she had only just picked it up, Clarke dropped the spear from her hand and wrapped her arms around Lexa. The Commander tightly returned the hug, holding Clarke like nothing else in the world mattered.

\--

“What the hell is going on in this damn mountain? I need answers. Now!” Clarke demanded as she, Lexa, and Bellamy passed through the control room doors.

“The system put itself on lockdown.” Monty answered from where he sat typing away at a computer.

“No shit.” Bellamy grumbled, turning to point his gun at the closing doors. There was still another Reaper wandering their level, and that was just the one they knew about. More could arrive at any second.

Limping over to them, Raven held out a detailed map of Mount Weather. “See that spot I marked? Top left corner? That’s where someone tried to open a door they weren’t authorized for. They set off the whole security system, put the entire mountain into minimum lockdown. If they would’ve actually gotten the door open, then we'd be under maximum lockdown instead. In that scenario, no major doors would open without our explicit permission. But with the way things are going, I’m thinking maybe that’s what we need.”

“Yeah, that’s what we need.” Clarke agreed. “Do you know who tried to get into the warehouse?”

Raven smirked and gestured to the large screen on the wall behind her. “I thought you’d want to know that.”

Clarke didn’t recognize the woman in the freeze frame, but it was obvious by the look of dread on Lexa’s face that she certainly did.

“Ontari.” Lexa spat the name. “She must’ve been looking for weapons.”

Raven reached over and hit a few buttons on the nearest console, causing a video to appear. She turned back to them and explained, “This is a live feed of the mess hall. You can see that same girl hanging out in the back with some tall dude. Looks like they’ve got about fifty people cooped up in there with them.”

Lexa observed the screen with wide eyes. “Azgeda is stronger than I thought.”

Raven gave her a funny look. “Well, those ass-gutters or whatever are the ones who made the Reapers. We’ve got footage of them injecting people with red liquid to turn them into those grody freaks. I can rewind and show you, if you want.”

“No, keep it live.” Lexa said distractedly as she took a few steps closer to the screen and narrowed her gaze. She pointed to a specific person. “Do you see that one? He’s not from Trikru. He’s one of yours.”

Clarke had trouble finding the particular face that Lexa was pointing out, but once she saw John Murphy he stood out to her like a flame in the dark.

“Why is Murphy with them?” Clarke asked, astounded that he would betray her.

“Hold on.” Raven used the various buttons on the console to zoom in on him. “Yep. Just as I thought. Look at his hands. He’s tied up. I don't think he's there by choice."

“They’re keeping him as a hostage.” Lexa assumed. “In case the Reapers fail.”

Bellamy glanced back over his shoulder at the screen and said, “They don’t have any weapons.”

Lexa gave him a harsh side-eye. “You don’t need weapons to break a man’s neck.”

Clarke ran a hand through her tangled hair, her mind racing to come up with a plan. Finally, she looked around at the others and wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt.

“Okay.” She said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Monty, get us to a maximum lockdown. We need to trap these Reapers where they are. Raven, get in contact with The Ark and let them know what's going on. And I want you to keep an eye on the mess hall. No matter what we do, we have to make sure they don’t kill Murphy. Bellamy, radio everyone who isn’t in this room. I want to know their locations. Last I heard, Miller was going down to level six, Jasper was outside keeping watch at the ridge, and Lincoln and Octavia were leaving the tunnels. I want us to be absolutely sure that the rest of our people are exactly where they should be.”

“What about the two of you?” Raven asked curiously. “What are you going to do?”

“Give us some guns.” Clarke ordered as she handed over her spear. “We’re going to kill some Reapers.”


	11. Taking Control

Clarke stood with her back to the open control room doors and with her handgun raised. The hallway was empty, just as Raven said it would be, but her paranoia was at an all-time high. There could be no mistakes. No slipups. No fumbles. No time for second guesses. No way in hell that she was going to let herself be caught with her guard down again.

“Clear.” She announced, prompting Lexa’s entrance to the hall. The Commander had refused to take any of the offered guns with her on their new mission of tracking down Reapers. Instead, Lexa had chosen to bring Clarke’s spear.

From where Bellamy stood in the doorway, he ran through the plan one last time. “It’ll be a few more minutes before the maximum lockdown goes into full effect, but it should fix these stupid emergency lights. That’ll give us all better visibility. Remember, when this lockdown kicks on, the Reapers will be stuck wherever they’re at. All you two have to do after that is find them wherever they get trapped. Miller reported one trying to break into level six. It’s not going to get through the stairwell door on its own, but it’s making a lot of noise. It’s waking people up. Scaring them. But someone from Trikru is helping him keep the peace down there. Indra, I think he said.”

“My people will listen to her.” Lexa vouched. “Indra will keep them safe.”

Bellamy pressed on. “Lincoln and Octavia are still in the tunnels. The charges on their batteries are about to run dry but they think they can get out in time. We can’t open the main doors for them while we’re under a lockdown, so they’ll just have to find Jasper on the ridge and stay on lookout with him for other Arkers.”

Clarke’s diligent watch over the empty hallway faltered at the mention of The Ark.

“Raven heard back from them?” She asked apprehensively. A full day had passed since Clarke had last spoken to her mother. A conversation under the current circumstances was likely to do more harm than good, but not even having the option to hear Abby’s voice unnerved her all the same.

Bellamy shook his head. “No, she hasn’t heard anything from them. Her and Monty think communications with The Ark have been down for the past few hours. They said it probably has something to do with the stations breaking apart and preparing for reentry. For all we know, our people could already be on their way to the ground.”

Clarke looked beyond Bellamy to where Raven was speedily typing on one of the console keyboards. She was worried, Clarke could tell simply from how tense the girl’s shoulders were. Raven had already lost so much. Finn. Wells. The use of her leg. Clarke wasn’t sure how the mechanic would handle it if Abby didn’t survive the reentry process. Even the worrying itself was a grim ordeal. Clarke knew that much from experience. The fear she’d felt when the Reaper was charging after her in the lab was child’s play compared to the pure terror she’d felt when Lexa had been the one in danger.

Shaking the thoughts from her head, Clarke focused on the task at hand. “Alright. Two Reapers are dead, one is on this floor, and one is at the door to level six. We’ll take care of the two we know about, just find us number five before it can find us. Hopefully we won’t encounter any new recruits lurking around when we’re done.”

Bellamy looked as if he wanted to make an objection, but he withheld it.

“Copy that.” He said before stepping back into the control room. The doors slid shut, and suddenly Clarke and Lexa were on their own again.

\--

“You’re absolutely sure that you’re good with just the spear?” Clarke asked for a third time as they searched a small break room.

Poking at a dusty coffee pot with her finger, Lexa distractedly replied, “I don’t need a gun to protect myself.”

Clarke gave her a knowing look. “You sure seemed to need a gun when you pried one out of Bellamy’s hands.”

“That was different.” Lexa turned to her. “I wasn’t the one who needed protecting.”

“I’d feel better about this if you had a gun.” Clarke admitted.

Putting on a show, Lexa whirled the spear around skillfully in her hands before saying, “I spent my entire childhood being trained on how to defend myself in combat. How to take down an assailant without using lethal force. How to logically assess a dangerous situation. How to formulate the best strategic maneuvers that will increase the odds of not only my own survival, but of the survival of my people. I appreciate your worry, Clarke, but it’s not necessary. I can protect myself.”

Clarke remained unconvinced. “What if the Azgedians get their hands on guns? What if they find a way to break into the warehouse? Into the armory? Into the weapons lockers? A spear won’t protect you from that.”

She raised a brow. “Is that not the point of progressing to a full maximum lockdown of the mountain? If our enemy is contained, I have nothing to fear.”

Switching gears, Clarke asked, “If your people were so prepared to use Reapers as an offensive strategy, why didn’t you ever create a way to stop them? Why didn’t you engineer some kind of a failsafe weakness that you could control? Some way to manipulate them?”

“To test such a factor, one would need a live Reaper to experiment on. The risk was too great. Like I said before, no Heda has ever _wanted_ to use a Reaper. The serum in storage was more for political pull than for actual use.” Lexa answered as she led the way back to the door.

Clarke followed her into the hall and replied, “I don’t understand why you would keep something so dangerous just sitting around in your station like that. The Azgedians could’ve been experimenting with that serum this whole time. That’s probably how they managed to make this homemade batch.”

“Was keeping the serum in storage any more dangerous than your people keeping a nuclear missile on The Ark?” She asked rhetorically. “It’s human nature to blur the lines between self-defense and self-destruction. Our Earth ancestors proved that, and now so have we.”

Heavy boots thudding repeatedly against the floor alerted the pair to danger in the upcoming hall. Lexa raised the spear and Clarke aimed her gun. They waited anxiously in tense silence for something to happen, but the sounds of moving feet only grew more distant. Clarke made a motion with her hand, signaling to Lexa that they should round the corner. Lexa gave a nod in agreement and brought the spear back down, ready to use it defensively.

With her heart beating furiously in her chest, Clarke jumped around the corner and faced the danger head on. Fortunately, the hallway was free of Reapers. Unfortunately, her nerves had nearly caused her to misfire her weapon anyway. The gun visibly shook in her hands as she let herself breath once more.

Having closely observed the incident, Lexa approached with caution. She gestured to the empty hall with the tip of her spear and whispered, “Don’t worry. It only gets easier from here.”

“What do you mean?” Clarke asked, unable to move or lower her gun.

Lexa never took her eyes off Clarke as she answered, “Killing humans. It only becomes easier to do once you’ve done it. Once you’ve crossed that line.” She paused. “Lucky for you, the Reapers aren’t your people. You didn’t grow up seeing their faces. Knowing their names. Their families. Their children. The man I shot to save you…he has three daughters. Three young girls who will never see their father again. And that’s my fault. It was his choice to take the serum, but it was my fault for failing him.”

“None of this is your fault.” Clarke replied, desperate for Lexa to understand that much. “None of it. The Azgedians, they’re the ones to blame. These Reapers chose to become monsters. They chose to take innocent lives. That’s not your fault.”

Lexa stood up a little straighter and adjusted her grip on the spear. Quietly, she said, “I am their Heda. I am responsible for them. I will take the blame for what my people have done.”

“They aren’t your people.” Clarke argued. “They left you. The Azgedians sent Reapers after you. They want you dead. You’re not responsible for their actions. No Arker is going to blame you for what they’ve done.”

Her gaze fell to the floor. “I should’ve foreseen this. I shouldn’t have given the Azgedian descendants so much freedom. I knew they wanted to leave us, I knew they’d be willing to kill me, but I never imagined that they would try to kill us all. Never. I had _faith_ in them. I trusted them to be better people than this.” She looked up at Clarke as something dawned on her. “I should have killed them.”

Clarke struggled to find the right words, so she settled for saying, “That’s not the kind of person you are.”

“How could you possibly know what kind of a person I am?” Lexa questioned doubtfully. “You hardly know me at all.”

Finally able to lower her weapon, Clarke faced Lexa and said, “You could’ve sent the Reapers to The Ark, but you didn’t. You could’ve killed my friends in the brig, but you didn’t. You’re the kind of person who let me say goodbye to Wells. The kind of person who fought for peace. The kind of person who saved my life, who harbored Octavia, who let me take the escape pod, who let a group of foreigners take the cargo plane, who spent hours carrying injured people into Medical…you’re the kind of person who had every reason not to trust me, but let me in anyway. You’re a good person. A good person who’s just doing what has to be done. You’re a leader; you have to make the big decisions that no one else can make. Those decisions aren’t always between a good outcome or a bad one. Most of the time, especially right now, those decisions come down to the lesser of two evils. You’re not a bad person for picking the lesser. You’re not a bad person for playing the cards that you’re dealt.”

Lexa nodded, paused, and then nodded once more.

“Come on.” Clarke urged. “Let’s keep moving.”

\--

“That’s impossible.” Raven’s voice carried through the radio with minimal interference. “The doors are sealed shut. No one is getting in or out of any level without my permission.”

Leaning with her back against the wall, Clarke kicked idly at the floor with the heel of her boot. Her adrenalized anxiety had quickly morphed into fretful exhaustion during their search for the other Reaper.

She brought the radio back up to her mouth and replied, “Then this Reaper must’ve found one damn good hiding spot. I’m telling you, he’s not here. We’ve been up and down these halls twice. He’s not here.”

Lexa used the dull end of her spear to tap Clarke’s restless foot. “Remain calm. There’s always an explanation.”

Clarke gave her a pointed look. “Unless that Reaper serum gave him the power of invisibility, he’s not here. We checked every room. He’s gone.”

“Keep looking.” Raven instructed. “You’re missing something. He has to be on this level somewhere. There’s nowhere else he can g—“

The radio cut off midsentence, causing Clarke and Lexa to lock eyes.

“Raven?” Clarke prompted warily.

“Clarke!” Raven’s voice sounded distant, as if she’d dropped the radio but somehow left the microphone on. “He’s in the ventilation system! He’s breaking into the control room!”

Clarke and Lexa took off running, their boots thudding loudly against the floor as they travelled at top speed. They rounded corner after corner in search for the right hallway, the sound of muffled erratic gunfire leading them in the right direction. Finally, they found the doors and began to pound their fists against the solid steel, screaming for the others to let them inside.

“Hang on.” Raven’s voice said through the radio moments before the doors slid apart and allowed them entrance.

“Where is he?” Clarke asked, her handgun raised and ready to be used as she and Lexa rushed into the control room.

“Ask the maniac who just wasted half his ammunition!” Monty shouted as he pointed to where Bellamy stood between consoles. His assault rifle was still aimed at an air vent in the ceiling, which was now surrounded by bullet holes.

“I think I got him.” Bellamy announced.

Before anyone could offer a celebratory response, the vent swung down from the ceiling, unhinged on all corners but one. The Reaper fell into the room in a dramatic cloud of dust. His burly figure crushed the console on which he landed, prompting the big screen to display a dozen error warnings.

“Get back!” Bellamy yelled before unloading relentlessly on the Reaper. The man’s body writhed with every bullet, but eventually stilled.

“Stop!” Monty screamed at him. “He’s dead, stop!”

The former Ark Guard Cadet only ceased his fire when the gun clicked empty. He stood perfectly still, his face drained of color, and stared at the destruction before him.

“Nice going.” Monty spat angrily.

Bellamy glared back at him. “I just saved your life!"

With an overly exaggerated flare, Monty waved his hands at the smoking console and the mangled body in the wreckage of sparking wires and blood. “You just took out our entire defense system!”

Clarke stepped between the boys, but directed her attention to Raven as she asked, “Are the doors still locked? Can you fix this?"

Though she was teetering on the edge of shock, Raven did her best to assess the situation. “I…I don’t know. Probably not. We could barely operate this old system with what we had. I don’t know if we can keep everything going with an entire console demolished. Those machines were the ones with access to the security system. These other computers don’t have the right programming. They’re for monitoring radiation levels, turbines, power, water filtration, air purity, communications…but without a security system in place, none of that matters. All it takes is one person to open a few of the right doors and they can irradiate the entire mountain. And if we can’t decontaminate remotely anymore, all we can do is hope that the sterilization process is engaged manually. Still, if one of those Reapers makes it to an exit door, Trikru might be screwed."

“Can you find out what’s working?” Clarke asked, doing her best to keep her panic from becoming too noticeable. “Can you do that for me, please?”

“Yeah.” Raven nodded numbly. She sent one last glance to the dead Reaper before turning her attention to a nearby keyboard.

Clarke directed her next question to Monty. “Is there any backup for this kind of system failure?”

He looked as if he wanted to shout a few more phrases Bellamy’s way, but he contained his fury long enough to answer Clarke. “If there is, we’ll have to do some digging. Like she said, we’re not experts at how to run this place. We’re making half of it up as we go along. Most of this programming is older than our Earth ancestors, and none of it has been run in a hundred years. There are bugs, glitches, missing codes. We have absolutely no idea how to get into the heavily secured areas and not enough time in the world to guess those passwords. We’ve hacked our way into most of the system, but there are still areas that are total blind spots for us. Whoever made this place made it with specific occupants in mind. This mountain is not a user-friendly place, okay? We’re not miracle workers. We’re just…doing what we can.”

“No one’s asking for anything more than that.” Clarke assured him.

Lexa quickly added, “You’ve done tremendously well so far. My people owe their lives to your abilities.”

Returning to reality, Bellamy scowled at the Commander. “Your people sure do have a funny way of showing their gratitude.”

Clarke was quick to jump to Lexa’s defense. “Hey! The Reapers are not her people. Not anymore. The Azgedians are a common enemy.”

“They’re all Trikru to me.” He replied sternly. “I’ll protect my own. Not them.”

“You’re doing a shitty job either way.” Monty grumbled.

Raven turned back to the others in time to stop another argument from kicking off. “Okay. So. Here’s the good news: the exit door in the tunnel is still locked and so are the main doors out front."

Clarke braced herself. “And what’s the bad news?”

Raven took in a deep breath and answered, “The lockdown has been lifted, the stairwell doors can be opened, all live feeds from the cameras are gone, the warehouse and the armory are both unlocked, and I’m pretty sure this Reaper messed with something in the ventilation system for this room. I'm guessing that he probably used something to block one of the fans. That’ll have to be fixed sooner rather than later, but our top priorities should be taking out the Azgedians, finding the Reapers, and getting Murphy back."

Clarke took a moment to think things over before she addressed the group.

“Okay.” She turned to face them all. “New plan. Bellamy, stay here and keep Azgeda from taking this room. Monty, radio everyone and make sure they’re all doing okay. Start with Miller and Indra in level six. Raven, see what you can salvage from the broken console. If we can get some parts of the security system back up and running, that would be great. If not, just focus on keeping Mount Weather running. As for us…” She glanced to Lexa. “It’s about time that we had a little chat with our friends Roan and Ontari.”


	12. The Truce

Rubbing her dry eyes, Clarke suppressed the urge to yawn. Her body had begun to show signs of fatigue long ago, sometime during the hours of standing on her feet attending to injuries in Medical. To say that her tank was running on empty would have been an understatement. She needed to get off her aching feet and sleep, but neither of those luxuries would be available to her any time soon. There was no time for relaxation when the fate of so many lives sat in her hands.

“Are you ready?” Lexa asked. She’d done something different with her hair while they’d been waiting for their guests to join them in the kitchen, but Clarke couldn’t quite put her finger on what was different.

“Yeah.” Clarke was surprised to find that she could hardly hear herself speak. Her ears were still ringing from Bellamy’s spurt of astoundingly loud gunfire in the control room, but more than that her voice had grown hoarse in their silence. She cleared her throat and tried again, a bit more convincing this time. “Yes. I’m ready.”

The Commander tapped her fingertips rhythmically against the stainless steel countertop in front of them. She looked fierce under the fluorescent lights. Like a wolf preparing for its hunt.

Using what little time they had left to her advantage, Clarke decided to ask her counterpart a question that had been sitting on the tip of her tongue.

“Do you think we’ll have to kill them?” She asked quietly, watching Lexa closely.

Lexa stared straight ahead, perhaps worried that she would lose her nerve if she even so much as glanced in Clarke’s direction.

“Probably.” She finally answered. “But we don’t have to. And maybe we shouldn’t.”

“They’ve killed people.” Clarke reminded her. “Their Reapers are still running around trying to kill the rest of us. They can’t get away with this.”

She stood straighter and raised her chin. “Killing Roan and Ontari won’t stop the Reapers. Yes, they have done terrible things and they do deserve to be punished, but you and I are not their judge and jury. They must be punished by the people who they’ve hurt. By the public. By _our_ people.”

“Azgeda wants us dead.” Clarke was much angrier than she thought she’d be. Logically, she knew Lexa was being a fair leader. But emotionally, Clarke wasn’t sure how to process the Commander’s response. Anger seemed to be the only emotion she had the energy for.

“I know.” Lexa snapped, her hands clamped tight to the countertop’s edge. Apparently, anger was contagious. “My people have suffered enough. I will not refuse them the right to avenge our dead. Roan and Ontari must pay, and they _will_ , but this is not the place. Don’t let your exhaustion blind you. This fight is not over. Not yet. They’ve agreed to speak with us in private, but who knows what kinds of tricks they may have up their sleeves.”

Before Clarke could come up with a solid counter argument, the door at the opposite end of the kitchen noisily swung open and banged against the wall. A tall man with long hair strutted into the room with a young boy and a teenage girl entering behind him. Roan, Clarke assumed, was dressed in tattered armor that looked as if it had been made by hand from spare bits of fabric and mismatched metal. For style, or perhaps for tradition, there was a thick floor-length cloak draped across his shoulders. A foreign symbol had been stitched into several places on his attire, but the emblem was displayed most prominently on the cloak’s center.

Ontari, whose face Clarke recognized from Raven’s video of the attempted warehouse break-in, lacked the metal armor and extravagant cloak. The boy, much like Roan, was unfamiliar to Clarke. If any of them had ventured into Medical with radiation poisoning, they must’ve slipped in and out without her notice. Not a difficult feat to accomplish considering the chaos of the day, but nevertheless a peculiar one.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Lexa asked tensely, her hand dropping below the counter to grab the spear she’d hidden. She kept it out of sight but ready to use as she waited for an explanation.

It wasn’t until Clarke saw Lexa’s reaction to the boy that she also noticed the tight grip Ontari had on his arm.

“Security.” Roan answered shortly.

Ontari reached around to her back and withdrew a jagged knife from her belt. She placed it threateningly close to the boy’s throat with a sickening grin on her face.

“Aden has no part in this.” Lexa was trying hard to keep up her professional tone, but Clarke could hear raw emotion breaking through. “He’s just a boy. Let him go.”

“Hand over your weapons and you can have the boy.” Roan offered with a casual shrug.

Clarke watched as Lexa released the spear and brought up her empty hands to show.

“We have no weapons with us.” She lied. “We only came to talk.”

Roan was unconvinced. “We’re not talking until your weapons are in our hands.”

Playing along, Clarke took out her gun from its hiding place and laid it on the countertop. Carefully, she slid it to the other end.

“There.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Now let him go.”

Roan chuckled as he approached the counter. Taking the gun into both hands, he immediately pointed it at Clarke. Looking to Lexa, he said, “Now it’s your turn.”

Rather than give Lexa the chance to reveal her spear, Clarke attempted to steal back Roan’s attention by saying, “That doesn’t sound like a very respectful way to treat your Heda.”

Her distraction proved successful as his eyes locked squarely on her.

“You sound awfully calm for a girl who has a gun aimed at her head.” He clicked off the safety with ease. “Did you think I wouldn’t know how to use one? Trikru may not have had guns, but it did have plenty of information about them. Did you know that our Earth ancestors uploaded digital encyclopedias to Trikru’s core database? Billions of detailed articles copied right off the internet itself.”

Though she was technically in mortal danger, Clarke found it easy to keep up with him. “I guess you missed the page about loyalty.”

“On the contrary.” He smiled. “I’ve never shown greater loyalty in all my life.”

Clarke remained unamused. “Then you must’ve missed the one on ‘how not to be a dick’ instead.”

He laughed, somehow enjoying their banter. He looked to Lexa and said, “I can see why you like this one. She’s quite charming.”

“You have the gun.” Lexa replied with her jaw clenched. “Release Aden.”

“Hand over the rest of your weapons.” He instructed.

Again, Lexa raised her empty hands. “I have none.”

Roan’s smile faded. “Am I going to have to come over there and get it myself? I’m in a good mood. You really don’t want to ruin that.”

“Just hand it over.” Ontari ordered, her knife still dangerously close to Aden’s throat. “I know you’ve got something back there. You wouldn’t have shown up without a weapon. That’s not what your Fleimkepa taught us. Always prepare for the worst, isn’t that what old Titus liked to say?”

Lexa planted her hands flat against the countertop. “Come and check, if you must.”

Clarke wasn’t sure what Lexa’s plan was, but she had faith in the Commander.

Roan let out a small sigh but remained where he stood. “Just keep your hands where I can see them or I’ll shoot the Arker between the eyes.”

Clarke raised a skeptical brow. “You think you’re that good of a shot?”

“Want to find out?” He asked, his patience running thin. “You wanted to talk. Let’s talk.”

“We’re willing to negotiate a peace treaty.” Lexa spun the lie with a convincing tone. “You want Mount Weather? Fine. You can have it. In return, we require an appropriate amount of time to adjust to the radiation levels outside before we leave; we want you to assist in capturing the Reapers; all of the remaining the Reaper serum must be destroyed under my supervision; and we want you to release your hostages.”

Ontari scoffed. “You still think all of this is because of a stupid mountain?”

Roan explained, “This is the dawn of a new age. The beginning of humanity’s return to Earth. You people…you Grounders and Arkers…you don’t belong here. You nearly destroyed us all in space with your petty fighting. Azgeda will bow to no Heda, no Council.”

Clarke knew that trying to argue with them was pointless, but she had to at least try. “We can exist independently. We’re the only humans on the entire planet. We can make it to where our two populations _never_ come across each other again.”

Roan wasn’t buying it. “I don’t think the rest of your people from The Ark will be accepting of that arrangement after they find out what’s happened here. How long will it be before they join us? Just few more hours, right? It wasn’t too difficult for Ontari to get that information out of your little friend Murphy.”

Ontari smirked and shifted the knife in her hand so that the light glinted off of it. “That one started squealing out all kinds of secrets before his blood even touched the floor.”

“He’s alive.” Roan clarified after catching the uneasy look on Clarke’s face. “For now.”

“So what’s the plan?” Clarke asked curiously. “Let your Reapers kill everyone, and then what? You’ve still got Reapers keeping you confined to the mess hall. Are you planning to take them all down with one little handgun? And since you know that the rest of The Ark will be here soon, I assume you’ve got a plan for what to do about them, right? Or is the plan to just lock the doors and hope they don’t find a way to get inside? Speaking of locking the doors, one of your friendly Reapers managed to get himself inside the control room and kind of sabotaged the entire security system. So, you know, good luck keeping a few hundred angry Arkers outside of a bunker that you can’t physically leave. And while we’re on the subject, how exactly are you planning to operate Mount Weather if you can’t get inside the control room? I hate to break this to you, but we’ve got people and guns in there _and_ your Reaper already exposed the only way that any of you could’ve snuck inside. So, I’m just wondering, what’s your plan?”

Reaching his boiling point, by Clarke or by his own lack of foresight or more likely by a mixture of the two, Roan pulled the trigger. He pressed back on it over and over, intending to send bullets right through Clarke’s skull, but the gun clicked empty each time. He stared at her unharmed face, bewildered.

“Oh, and one more thing.” Clarke raised her index finger to signify her last point. “You might want to make sure a gun is loaded before you try to shoot someone with it.”

Through her own anger, Ontari let out an animalistic scream before she sliced her knife across Aden’s throat. The boy fell to his knees, his black blood spurting out so wildly that it seemed too gruesome to be real. In a blur of movement, Lexa’s spear became lodged into Ontari’s chest. In unison, Aden and Ontari’s bodies fell lifelessly to the floor. Black blood puddled around them as the others began to scramble around the room.

While Lexa ran around the counter, Clarke hopped on top of it and slid her way across the smooth surface. Roan went for the spear but Lexa was tackling him before he could get it free. The back of his head slammed against the floor with a nauseating smack. Kneeling on his armored torso, Lexa pinned down the large man and wrapped her hands around his neck. Clarke snatched the gun from where it had fallen out of Roan’s grip. She searched her pockets for the bullets she’d emptied from it, finding them around the time that Roan’s face began contorting in breathless agony.  

Once Clarke finally had the gun loaded and ready to use, a process which seemed to take much longer than when Bellamy had first shown her how to do it, she cautiously stepped around Aden and Ontari’s bodies to get a better view of Roan. She dropped down to one knee and aimed the gun at his head, her finger over the trigger and ready to fire.

“You can let go.” Clarke said to Lexa.

The Commander bared her gritted teeth and grunted as she strangled the writhing man beneath her. He desperately tried to pull her hands from his neck, but the blow to his head left him too disoriented and weak to defend himself.

“You can let go.” Clarke repeated.

Tears streamed down Lexa’s cheeks as she continued to squeeze the life out of him. His eyes rolled back in his head and his hands fell limp around her wrists.

“Lexa.” Clarke lowered the gun. “Lexa, stop. You’re killing him. This isn’t what you wanted.”

“I never wanted this.” She cried, echoing words that she’d said to Clarke in the past, in a time that seemed like ages ago. Roan’s body began to convulse as Lexa screamed, “I never wanted any of this!”

The kitchen door from which Roan, Ontari, and Aden had entered swung open. Instinctively, Clarke aimed her gun at the intruder.

“Whoa.” Murphy raised his hands in surrender. His eyes travelled from the ongoing strangulation to the dead bodies nearby. “Looks like you two have been busy.”

Finally, Lexa released her hold on Roan’s neck, the outline of her fingers still visible on his skin. She stretched out her hands as she tumbled sideways to sit beside Clarke on the ground. Breathing heavy, she stared at her hands and watched as they progressively shook harder with each breathe she took.

Clarke brought down the gun and asked Murphy, “What’s going on in there?”

“In there?” Murphy gestured to the open door. “Board games, mostly. Some cards too. These, uh, what are they calling themselves again? Asthmatics? Aztecs? Whoever they are, they’re all a bunch of lousy cheaters. Even the kids. It’s like they’ve never heard of rules before.”

“What?” Clarke tried to stand, but her tired legs felt like jelly. “But…they had you tied up. We saw it. Before the live feed was cut off. We saw you with your hands tied behind your back. And…they said they tortured you for information.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, they started to do the whole intimidating torture thing, so I told them what they wanted to know and they’d untie me. Look, I knew someone would eventually show up and deal with them. I didn’t tell them anything that would stop that.”

“Where are the guards?” Clarke tried to keep her voice low so that it wouldn’t carry through the open door.

“They all got turned into Reapers.” He stepped closer to them and crouched down on the other side of Roan. “Is he dead?”

Clarke glanced to Lexa, who still sat staring at her trembling hands in a daze. She looked back to Murphy and answered, “I think so. If there aren’t any guards, who’s watching you?”

He motioned to Roan and Ontari. “They were.”

“Won’t the others notice that you’re missing?” Clarke was more confused by Murphy’s nonchalance than by anything else.

“This guy, Rohan? Rune? He told everyone he wanted me to come back here alone when the clock hit the hour mark. They won’t come looking on their own. Besides, they’re all bandaged up, remember? These three, shit, what’d they call them…nightbloods? Yeah, these nightbloods were the only Ass-Guardians who didn’t have radiation poisoning. I helped clean up half of the people back there when they came through Medical. They trust me.”

“Aden wasn’t Azgedian.” Lexa muttered numbly. “He was training to become the next Heda. In the event of my death…he would’ve succeeded me.”

Murphy looked over to where the boy’s body sat undisturbed. “He was just a kid. How could he be next in line for anything?”

Clarke cleared her throat. “Questions for another day, Murphy.”

“Right.” He replied understandingly. “Probably better to talk about it over brunch instead of over bodies.”

\--

Clarke was pulled from sleep slowly, drawn into consciousness by a rustling noise. She had to blink several times to escape the thick haze of her dream world. When she could finally see, the most familiar face in the universe smiled down at her.

“Mom?” Clarke reached out her hand and found her mother’s on the bed. She could feel her warmth. She could smell her. She could see her. She had to be real. There, sitting right beside her, fallen from space, was her mother.

“I’m so proud of you.” Abby’s voice was gruff with emotion that nearly overwhelmed her. She delicately traced her hand over the watch on Clarke’s wrist. “Your father would’ve been proud, too.”

“How are you here? What happened?” Clarke tried to push herself into a sitting position, but the exertion only made her woozy. Her joints were stiff, her muscles sore, stomach empty, and throat dry. She couldn’t remember how she’d fallen asleep, or when, or even why.

“Don’t strain yourself. You need your rest.” Abby gestured to a vacant chair near the wall. “I had a nice long chat with the Commander while you were sleeping. She said you fainted from exhaustion. John Murphy helped her carry you down to bed from the mess hall.”

“What about the Reapers?” Clarke questioned.

Abby released a heavy sigh. “All dead but one. He’s restrained for now. Jackson is overseeing his detoxification. I’m not sure he’ll survive the withdrawal, but we’re going to try.”

“The Azgedians?”

“Under the supervision of the Commander’s guards. She plans to speak with each of them before she decides what to do. Most of them were just bystanders to the rebellion. Family members of the Reapers, children, a few elderly parents. I got the chance to speak briefly with them when I examined their injuries. You did well when you cared for them, Clarke.”

“I had help.” She shrugged off the compliment like a reflex.

“I’m proud of you.” Abby reiterated, reaching over to comb a few tangles from Clarke’s hair with her fingers.

“Where is everyone?” Clarke wondered aloud.

“Raven is asleep in the other room. I think this is the first real break she’s had in days. She refused to leave the control room until she was confident that Sinclair could keep the mountain operational in her absence.” Abby smiled fondly at the mention of Raven’s name. “The others who came to Earth with you are all safe. John Murphy, Jasper Jordan, Monty Green, Nathan Miller, Bellamy Blake, the newly introduced _Octavia_ Blake, the Trikru man named Lincoln. All safe.”

“Where’s Lexa?”

“Chancellor Kane is discussing the details of a peace treaty with the Commander now. She was reluctant to meet with him at first. I had to promise that I wouldn’t leave your side just to get her out of this room.”

Clarke tried again to sit up, but only succeeded in doing so with Abby’s assistance.

“I need to be there.” She said as she flung her legs over the side of the bed.

“No, you need to rest.” Abby was able to keep Clarke in place with no more than a simple hand on her shoulder. “You’re too weak to walk that far. Your body needs more time to recover.”

“I _need_ to be there.” Clarke insisted. “I can’t let Kane take advantage of Trikru. They’re in mourning, they’re hurt, and if he threatens to kick them out then they’ll be without shelter and supplies. I can’t let that happen. They’ve been through too much. I have to be there for Lexa. I have to help her.”

Abby smiled softly again as she muttered, “So much like your father.”

“Mom.” She pleaded. “You don’t know what we went through to get here. I was there. I saw what Lexa had to do to keep us safe, to keep this mountain out of Azgeda’s control. She saved my life. I owe her.”

“What makes you so certain that Marcus wants to cast them out into the cold?” Abby asked her seriously.

“That’s what Jaha would’ve done.” Clarke countered.

“Possibly.” Abby allowed. “But Thelonious isn’t Chancellor anymore. And this isn’t The Ark. We have options here on the ground, options that were never open to us in space.”

“Does Kane still want Lexa to give up Trikru’s independence?”

“Of course. It would make for a much simpler transition into the new world. A world that we could build together as one.”

“She won’t do it.” Clarke replied knowingly.

“No, she won’t.” Abby agreed. “But I don’t know how two bodies of government are supposed to live harmoniously together inside one mountain. Two governments with different values, different rules, different traditions.”

Clarke failed to hide her true feelings on the matter. Struggling, she asked, “They’re going to have to leave, aren’t they?”

Abby gave Clarke’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “The future isn’t set in stone. There may come a day when we can all live together.”

“This isn’t fair.”

“Politics never are.”

Clarke looked up to the ceiling and blinked a few times in an ineffective attempt to keep her tears from spilling out. As the drops ran down her face, Abby wiped them away with her thumb.

“Get some rest. It’ll be a while before their meeting is over. You have time to sleep.”

Reluctantly, Clarke laid back and allowed Abby to tuck her in. She found sleep quickly, almost as if she’d never left it.

\--

The next time Clarke awoke, the smell of food is what lured her from her slumber. Her eyes pried open and searched the bedroom for the source. A tray had been placed on the bedside table for her, holding a warm meal and plastic cup of water. Slouched over in the chair beside the nightstand was the very girl that Clarke had been dreaming of.

“You’re awake.” Lexa smiled and ran her thumb over the back of Clarke’s hand.

“The meeting…” Clarke’s brain felt scrambled after her long nap. “What happened?”

“Chancellor Kane is a bold man.” Lexa admitted. “Straightforward, concise, ambitious. I like him.”

“So it went well?” She hated how hopeful she sounded.

“He’s a good man, but he still wants me to relinquish my political authority.”

“You can’t do that.”

Lexa nodded. “And I won’t.”

“So you’re leaving?” Clarke asked heatedly. “Just like that? After everything we went through to save this place, he still wants you to go live somewhere else? That’s not fair, Lexa. This mountain is as much yours as it is ours.”

She smiled at Clarke’s reaction. “Trikru isn’t leaving Mount Weather just yet.”

Clarke’s mind went blank. She had trouble finding even the simplest of words. “W-what? You…you said…but…how?”

“We negotiated a peace treaty that allows for a temporary partnership between Trikru and The Ark. It expires in a year’s time. After that, if our differences prove to be too great to overcome, my people will leave. A new universal set of laws will have to be written and ratified by myself and Chancellor Kane, but for now it’s a work in progress.”

“And everyone is okay with that?” Clarke was trying her best to follow along, but the way Lexa’s beautiful smile lit up her face was quite the distraction.

“Not everyone, no. The remaining Azgedian descendants are planning to leave and build a settlement elsewhere. Once their bodies have safely adjusted to the radiation levels, they’ll go.” Lexa explained. “There’s a rumor that your former Chancellor plans to go with them.”

Clarke sat with that news for a while before she could comment on it.

“Losing Wells must’ve devastated him.” She assumed. As much as Wells’s death affected her, she knew the pain had to be infinitely worse for his father.

Lexa began to draw patterns on the back of Clarke’s hand as she replied, “Your mother said something similar. To lose your child…I can’t imagine the agony.”

Clarke watched the other girl closely. “Are you okay? After everything that happened…”

“I will be.” She answered softly. “With time.”

“I’m always here for you if you ever need to talk about it.” Clarke promised.

She hesitated before saying, “I lied to you yesterday. When I said that killing other humans gets easier, I was wrong. Killing people doesn’t get easier. It only gets harder. Each time…it felt like I was giving up a piece of myself to take their life.”

“You didn’t have a choice.” Clarke assured her.

“But I did.” She sounded so fragile. So lost. Clarke had often wondered if a leader as resilient as Lexa had a breaking point; now she had her answer. “Ontari…Roan…their lives weren’t for me to take. I let my emotions control my actions. I let my anger, my _grief_ , consume me. I failed my people.”

Clarke propped herself up on her elbow to get at eye level with Lexa.

“Hey, listen to me. You did not fail anyone. You saved my life. You saved everyone. You didn’t start that war, they did. You’re not a bad person for putting an end to it. It was better this way, trust me. Our people would’ve wanted them dead for what they did anyway. They killed an innocent boy right in front of us. They weren’t good people. We couldn’t have just let them go out into the world. They didn’t deserve the second chance that you’re giving the rest of the Azgedians. They didn’t deserve your mercy. You did what you had to do.”

“When I had Roan…you told me to stop…but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to.” She paused to collect herself. “I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to hurt him. I _wanted_ to kill him.”

Clarke moved her hand so that it was covering Lexa’s on the bed.

“So did I.” Clarke confessed. “If it had been up to me, I would’ve pulled the trigger on him. I think a part of me told you to stop so that I could be the one to do it. You’d already killed the Reaper and Ontari, I wanted to spare you of having to kill again. I thought that’s what you would’ve wanted.”

Lexa shook her head. “It’s better that it was me who did it. There was already blood on my hands. Yours are still clean.”

“Yeah, well, my conscience sure doesn’t feel that way.” Clarke sighed.

“What do you mean?” She asked, puzzled.

“Finn, Wells, the forty-eight grounders who died from radiation poisoning, the Reaper you had to kill to save me, Aden, Roan and Ontari, all of your people that the Reapers murdered, the other dead Reapers.” The more people Clarke listed, the worse she felt. “All of those deaths were caused by things I did. I’m the root of every death. If I hadn’t gone across the bridge by myself in the first place, all of this could’ve been avoided.”

“If you hadn’t crossed the bridge and met me in the garden, none of us would be here at all.” Lexa countered amicably. “Clarke, you singlehandedly stopped a war in space between Trikru and The Ark. You gave us the opportunity to forge an alliance. Your leadership saved lives.” She smiled. “You brought humanity back to the ground. In a hundred years, your name will be the one they remember.”

Clarke felt a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. “Nah, they’ll be too busy gushing over stories of my girlfriend, the great and powerful Heda whose people traversed the solar system. Leader of Trikru, slayer of Reapers. The girl who dreamed of flowers. The girl who kissed Saturn.”

“Girlfriend?” Lexa raised a questioning brow, amused.

Clarke could hardly contain herself. “Yeah, if you’re lucky.”

“I do like the sound of that.” She confessed.

“Me too.” Clarke fell back against the pillow, content. “Me too.”


	13. Finding Peace

“Don’t eat those.”

“Why?”

“They look poisonous.”

“You don’t know that.”

Clarke snatched the handful of berries from Lexa’s palm and tossed them one by one into the distance as she said, “They taught earth skills on The Ark, remember? Besides, these berries have been existing for a hundred years untouched by humans in a radiation soaked forest. There’s no telling what they might do to you. It’s better to leave those experiments to the specialists. I don’t need you getting sick from some stupid berries on your first real hike.”

Lexa gave no reply. Instead, she bypassed Clarke on the trail and abruptly took a detour off the newly beaten path. The Commander moved quickly through the undergrowth that covered the downhill terrain, weaving around trees and roots as she saw fit. Clarke followed, but not without protest.

“Hey, slow down. Let me catch up. Where are you going?” Clarke called out before stopping to pull her trapped boot from a mass of tangled vines. Freed, she looked ahead and realized with dread that Lexa was out of sight.

Clarke barreled recklessly through the vegetation in search for the Commander. Though Lexa was immune to the radiation and had proven to be capable of defending herself in combat, the outside world was full of unpredictable dangers. In the last few days alone, Lincoln and Octavia had encountered an aggressive mother bear; Monty had sworn he’d spotted a two-headed deer grazing near the creek; and Jasper had gotten himself stuck in a pit of mud for hours before Bellamy and Miller found him. There were a thousand ways that Lexa could get hurt or lost, and each one of them plagued Clarke’s thoughts as she ran through the woods.

Just as Clarke was bringing up her hands to amplify her shouts, she stumbled into a clearing and found the girl she’d been chasing after. Lexa stood perfectly still with her arms outstretched and her face turned upward to the blue sky. Surrounded by a field of colorful wildflowers, she seemed to glow in the sunlight. Happiness swelled in Clarke’s stomach and spread warmth throughout her body, making her feel as though she’d swallowed the sun whole. She’d never seen anything quite as beautiful as Lexa in that moment.

Noticing Clarke, Lexa let her arms fall to her sides and smiled. She looked so different than she had on Trikru on in Mount Weather. She looked so happy to be outside. So carefree. So peaceful.

“You finally got your flowers.” Clarke observed as she made her way toward Lexa through the meadow. 

“I’ve dreamed of this my whole life, but it’s even more beautiful than I ever imagined.” Lexa replied, squinting at her through the sunlight.

“Is that because I’m here?” Clarke couldn’t resist the chance to flirt. It was something they’d been doing an increasing amount of since the peace treaty was signed. In fact, the two girls had hardly even left each other’s sides since that fateful day with the Reapers.

“Oh, of course.” Lexa played along. “This land pales in comparison to the absolute beauty that is Clarke Griffin.”

Clarke had to turn away to hide her blush. Glancing over her shoulder, she replied, “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

Lexa plucked a flower from the ground and carefully placed it behind Clarke’s ear. She her fingertips trail along Clarke’s jaw as she brought her hand down. She smiled and said, “Then I suppose that I’ll have to reevaluate my strategy.”

Confronted with the urge to lean in for a kiss, Clarke chose to follow her heart after days of denying it. Every moment before had felt too soon. She hadn’t wanted what they had to be tainted by grief. Their blossoming love needed to be separate from their pain, not a crutch for them to become dependent upon. They could heal and move on from the tragedy together, but using their romance as a distraction was not the way.

Giving into desire, Clarke turned back and kissed her. The sun was warm on their skin and the wind danced through the field of flowers as their lips met. For the first time in her life, Clarke felt completely free. Free from a claustrophobic life aboard a space station. Free from the watchful eyes of her peers looking to her for leadership. Free from the constant fear and agony that had begun to feel like an everlasting ache in her bones. She felt free, and, more importantly, she felt loved. Sure, her mother and friends loved her, but their love wasn’t like Lexa’s. The way this girl from the edge of the solar system held Clarke so delicately, the way this girl who’d risked life and limb to secure peace for humanity looked at Clarke like she was flawless, the way this girl who’d only ever wanted to do right by others and never asked for anything in return sacrificed the very foundation of her values to save Clarke’s life, the way this girl’s love felt was unlike anything Clarke had ever experienced before.

Abruptly, Clarke felt Lexa’s lips leave hers. She opened her eyes to see the Commander sprinting through the wildflowers. She spun around in circles with her hands raised toward the sky and beckoned with a song for Clarke to try and catch her. As Clarke laughed and ran after Lexa, she felt that, if only for this one afternoon in the meadow, the heavy burdens of their decisions had been lifted from their shoulders.

\--

Though people gossiped about Clarke and Lexa’s friendship, most kept their comments to themselves.

Most.

Raven, on the other hand, could always be counted on to speak her mind. There was never any doubting that the mechanic would vocalize her thoughts on Clarke and Lexa’s intensifying relationship, but the time and place in which she chose to have that particular conversation certainly took Clarke by surprise.

Clarke was mid-shower when Raven barged into the bathroom uninvited. There were many times when Clarke hated the fact that each residence in Mount Weather had to share a single bathroom, but none more so than this very moment.

“So…you and Commander McHottie…” Raven began as she hopped onto the sink counter and swiveled to the side so that her leg could be stretched out in front of her. 

Poking her head around the shower curtain, Clarke shot a displeased glare at her friend.

Raven continued, unbothered. “What’s the deal with you two? Are you together? Are you dating? Taking it slow? Already exchanging promise rings?”

“Do we have to talk about this right now?” Clarke asked, annoyed.

“Yeah.” Raven answered with grin. “Because now you can’t just run away from me or pretend you have somewhere urgent to be. I know you, Clarke. Getting juicy details out of you is harder than finding a decent pressure regulator.”

“I’ll only talk if you promise never to say ‘juicy details’ ever again.” Clarke bargained.

“Deal.” Raven was clearly surprised to see Clarke cave so easily, but she wasted no time in diving right into the big questions. “So, what’s the situation? I mean, she sleeps in your bed every night…are you two hitting the moon or what?”

“We just talk.” Clarke answered truthfully.

“But you want more, right?” She assumed.

Clarke hid behind the safety of the shower curtain before replying, “Maybe.”

“So is it official?” Raven inquired, her voice accompanied by the sounds of metallic squeaks as she adjusted her brace. “Are the two of you exclusive?”

Clarke didn’t want to assume what she didn’t know for sure, so she kept her answer ambiguous.

“We’re enjoying each other’s company.”

Raven laughed. “Alright, fair enough. So let’s recap. You two stay up talking all night long. You haven’t landed on the moon yet but you’re willing to launch the rocket if she is. You haven’t labeled your feelings for each other yet, but I get the feeling you’re ready for the commitment. So, what’s the hold up? Are you afraid she doesn’t feel the same?”

Clarke let the hot spray from the shower clear her mind and ease her nerves. She’d never been very comfortable opening up about her short-lived romances to others, but this time it was different. Lexa wasn’t like the flings and crushes of her youth. The way Lexa made her feel, and the way she suspected Lexa felt in return, was beyond anything that Clarke knew.

“It’s not that I’m afraid she doesn’t feel the same…” Clarke admitted. “It’s that I know she does. I know what we have. I know what we’re doing. But every time I feel like we could be something more, I can’t bring myself to go there. Things are good, but for how long? How long will peace last before the rug is pulled out from under us again? How long before something out of our control pits us against each other? How long before something takes her from me?”

Raven was quiet for so long that Clarke wondered if she’d up and left the bathroom. When the mechanic finally spoke, her serious tone left Clarke hanging on to each and every word.

“Look, Clarke, I know I pretend like I’ve got all the answers, but I don’t. I can’t sit here and promise you that tomorrow will be another bright and sunny day. I can’t pretend like we’re not dealing with a world of uncertainties ahead of us. All I can say is what I know, and what I know is that love should never be taken for granted. Love is hard to find. Don’t let it pass you by just because you’re scared you’ll lose it once you’ve got it. You never know when the people you love are going to leave you, but that’s only more of a reason to love them while you can. What’s that old Earth saying? Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? That’s what I’m trying to say. Even if I could see the future and knew the exact day that me or Abby would lose the other…I’d still want to love her while I could. Just think of all the people who aren’t around anymore. Would you want to go back in time and tell yourself not to love them if you could? Would you tell yourself not to love Finn or Wells or your dad? No. You wouldn’t. Because the love you feel for them is stronger than the pain of losing them. We don’t love people because we know that they’ll be around forever; we love them because we know they won’t be.”

Clarke pulled back the shower curtain just enough to poke out her head.

“Are you saying that you wouldn’t love me if I was immortal?”

Raven laughed and made an obscene gesture with her hand. “I’m over here getting emotional and this is how you treat me? Go float yourself, Griffin.”

“In all seriousness…” Clarke trailed off as she searched for the right words to say. “Thank you. I mean it. You’re a better friend than either of us ever gives you credit for. Hearing you talk about love and death…it’s a lot to process, but I think you’re right.”

“We’ve been through a lot lately, especially you and her.” Raven allowed. “It’s okay to take your time. It’s okay to make sure being with her is really what you want. Just don’t wait too long. If you wait too long, you might miss your chance to love her at all. Better to try and fail than to wait and regret, right? You know, for someone who came flying down alone to an irradiated planet on the off-chance that she could save humanity from having a war in space, you’ve got a lot of reservations about the future all of a sudden. What changed? Where’d that impulsive girl who broke into a foreign space station go?”

Clarke cut off the shower’s water and wrapped a towel securely around herself. Stepping out onto the cement floor, she turned to her friend and answered solemnly, “That girl saw her friends die. She saw strangers burnt so badly that their families couldn’t identify them. She saw people’s bodies after they’d been ripped apart. She saw the girl she loves kill people to save her life.” She shivered as cool water dripped from her hair and ran down her back. “You can’t live through all of that without it changing you.”

Raven blinked. “You love her?”

“I…” Clarke backpedaled, not having realized that she’d let the word slip out.

Raven grinned. “You love her.” She swung her leg down from the counter and carefully stood. On her way to the door, she glanced back over her shoulder and smiled even wider. “Things may change, but some things always stay the same.”

\--

Nights inside Mount Weather were cold. The drop in temperature, combined with a lack of color and the taste of filtered air being pumped through vents in the ceiling, reminded Clarke of her lonely days in lockup. It was strange to think that not even three weeks had passed since her release. So much had changed since her eighteenth birthday. So many lives had been forever altered. She was hardly even the same person that had walked across the bridge to Trikru for the first time.

“Do you want me here?” Lexa’s question pulled Clarke from her thoughts like a slap.

“What?” The inquiry was so random that Clarke wondered if she’d heard it right.

“Do you want me here?” Lexa repeated patiently as her fingers continued to absentmindedly trail along Clarke’s forearm. They felt hot against Clarke’s skin, which left the blonde with butterflies fluttering in her stomach.

Clarke adjusted her head on the pillow so that she could get a better look at the girl lying next to her on the bed. It was difficult to see her in the dark, even with light filtering in from beneath the door, but Clarke could see her well enough to know that the Commander had a troubled look on her face.

“Of course I want you here.” Clarke answered. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Sometimes I feel like an intruder.” She quietly confessed. “This mountain doesn’t feel like a home to me. I hate being underground, but more than that I hate feeling like a guest in someone else’s home. I want this peace treaty to work, and I do want an alliance that can unite our people, but I feel like a burden. I feel like my people don’t belong here.”

“Give it time.” Clarke urged. “Your feelings might change. You might actually grow to like this place.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you can leave.”

She looked over to Clarke and asked, “What would happen to us if my people left?”

Clarke had to avert her gaze before she could reply, “That depends on how far you go.”

“My nightblood scouting team returned today.” Lexa informed her. “They said there’s a city about a day’s walk from here. It’s overgrown, but they believe it can be reclaimed. I’ll have to see it for myself before I make any decisions, but the majority of my advisers have already voiced their approval. Anya, Indra, and Titus all agree that we should live outside Mount Weather. That we should build our own society independent from The Ark.”

“Does that mean Lincoln disagrees with the other advisers?” Clarke wondered.

“He wishes to remain with Octavia.” She answered, her fingers beginning to make patterns on Clarke’s arm. “But I can’t blame him for wanting to follow his heart.”

Clarke locked eyes with Lexa in the dark. Suppressing her nerves, she asked, “Is that why you’re conflicted?”

“Of course.” Lexa freely admitted. “I don’t want to lose you, but I have to look out for my people.”

“You said this city is a day’s walk away?” Clarke questioned.

“Yes.” She confirmed.

“I think we can manage that.” Clarke smiled. “Being with you is worth the effort.”

Lexa rolled onto her side and propped herself up on her elbow. She pushed her hair back and looked down at Clarke like a person who’d just seen a miracle.

After placing a soft kiss on Clarke’s lips, she pulled back and said, “I’d walk around the Earth for you.”

“You just had to go and upstage me, huh?” Clarke teased.

Lexa smiled down at her. “I would think it impossible to outshine the girl who brought humanity back to the ground.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten very far without your escape pod. It took both of us to bring our people home.” Clarke reminded her.

Without warning, Lexa kissed her again and whispered against her lips, “I love you.”

When Clarke opened her eyes, she stared up at Lexa in awe. No romantic partner of hers had ever said those three words to her before, and truthfully she’d never felt the need to say those words to any of them either. Hearing Lexa say that she loved her, hearing her feelings be vocalized so earnestly, was a shock.

“You’ve only known me for a few weeks.” Clarke mumbled, still trapped in a daze.

“Time is irrelevant.” Lexa replied, her eyes glancing down to Clarke’s lips. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my whole life. You consume my thoughts, Clarke. You’re the only person I never tire of being near. You inspire me to be a better person. You’re amazing and you don’t even know it. I love everything about you. Every day that we spend together…I find myself falling more and more in love with you.”

“Oh.” There was so much that Clarke wanted to say, but words failed her.

“Sorry.” Lexa smiled and bashfully looked away. “I’ve never been this open with anyone before. It’s all a bit new to me. I didn’t mean to overwhelm you.”

Just as it had in the meadow, a warm ball of happiness filled Clarke’s stomach and spread throughout her body. Without a doubt in her mind, she confidently said, “I love you, too.”

Lexa’s gaze locked with Clarke’s.

“Really?” She asked hopefully.

“Really.” Clarke muttered before she grabbed Lexa by the back of the neck and pulled her closer for a kiss.

Kissing Lexa was unlike kissing anyone else. The Commander was soft, but purposeful. She led each kiss, leaving Clarke happy to reciprocate. And she smelled wonderful. Like the flowers from their field. Lexa even made sure to keep her hair from falling in Clarke’s face, and she would take occasional breaks from kissing just to pull back and smile at Clarke beneath her.

Kissing Lexa was amazing, to say the least.

With a surprising amount of expertise, Lexa’s hand travelled down from Clarke’s cheek and began unbuttoning the blonde’s shirt. Her fingers undid each button with minimal issue, all while their lips were preoccupied above. After the last button was undone, Lexa trailed her fingertips lightly over Clarke’s stomach and between her breasts, making Clarke’s heart race with anticipation. Lexa took her time, perhaps out of nervousness or perhaps just to allow Clarke the opportunity to oppose her actions if she wanted to—an objection that Clarke was far from giving.

“Is this okay?” Lexa asked as she kissed along Clarke’s jawline and then to her neck.

“Yes.” Clarke nearly moaned the word as Lexa’s fingers grazed over a hardened nipple.

“I’ve never done this before.” Lexa timidly confessed before finding a particularly sensitive area on Clarke’s neck to kiss.

“Well, you’re doing great so far.” Clarke laughed. She took Lexa’s wandering hand and placed it at her waistband encouragingly. Her skin beneath Lexa’s palm felt as if it was on fire from the contact.

Taking the hint, Lexa’s hand slipped beneath Clarke’s shorts and underwear while her lips remained at Clarke’s neck.

“Oh.” Clarke gasped as Lexa’s fingers found their destination.

“Does this feel okay?” Lexa kept her voice low as she kissed along Clarke’s exposed collar bone.

“Yes.” Clarke bit her bottom lip and shut her eyes, allowing herself to be consumed by how Lexa’s fingers teased her. She spread her legs apart to allow the girl better access, a move that pleased them both.

An expletive or two slipped from Clarke’s mouth as Lexa ran the length of her slick middle finger along Clarke’s aching clit. Her hips began to move on their own against the bed, matching the rhythm of Lexa’s fingers.

“That…” Clarke gave up on speaking, unable to keep her thoughts in order long enough to get a proper sentence out. The pure ecstasy that was coursing throughout her center from Lexa’s touch was more than enough to leave her mind blank. In those moments, there was no outside world. No distractions. No worries.

Only them.

“I’m…” Clarke tried again to speak, this time to warn Lexa of her impending climax, but words failed her once more. Grabbing fistfuls of the bedsheets, she held tight to them as the immense pleasure between her legs reached its boiling point. Her toes curled, the building pressure in her clit released itself, and her entire body tensed in response. Lexa kissed her suddenly, muffling the satisfied moans that slipped past her lips.

They sat in a peaceful quiet for a minute or two, just lying on the bed holding each other, before Lexa broke the silence.

“Was that…” She trailed off, growing shy.

Still breathing heavy, Clarke opened her eyes to look over at her and smile.

“Amazing.” Clarke answered. “That was…amazing. A little embarrassing though. Normally it takes me a lot longer than that to…you know…finish, I guess.”

Lexa grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Clarke laughed and wrapped her arms tighter around Lexa. Finding her courage, she asked, “So…girlfriends?”

Lexa laughed and gently kissed Clarke’s forehead before letting out a small, content sigh.

“Girlfriends.” She agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me here: puntrest.tumblr.com


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